Population projections for Puerto Rico, before and after Hurricane Maria. Puerto Rico’s population was already declining; the hurricanes made future losses harder to project. Graphic: Government of Puerto Rico

By Frances Robles
9 August 2018
SAN JUAN, P.R. (The New York Times) – The government of Puerto Rico has quietly acknowledged in a report posted online that in all likelihood more than 1,400 people died in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria — a figure that is more than 20 times the official death toll.Hurricane Maria cut through the island on 20 September 2018 , knocking out power and initially killing about a dozen people. The government’s official count eventually swelled to 64, as more people died from suicide, lack of access to health care, and other factors. The number has not changed despite several academic assessments that official death certificates did not come close to tallying the storm’s fatal toll.But in a draft of a report to Congress requesting $139 billion in recovery funds, scheduled for official release on Thursday, the Puerto Rican government admits that 1,427 more people died in the last four months of 2017 compared with the same time frame in the previous year. The figures came from death registry statistics that were released in June, but which were never publicly acknowledged by officials on the island.“Although the official death count from the Puerto Rico Department of Public Safety was initially 64, the toll appears to be much higher,” said the report, titled Transformation and Innovation in the Wake of Devastation.In another section, it said: “According to initial reports, 64 lives were lost. That estimate was later revised to 1,427.”The government was widely criticized for undercounting the number of people who died on the island as the power outage stretched for months, causing deaths from diabetes and sepsis to soar. Many people died from lack of access to hospitals, or because there was no power to run the machines they used to breathe.After a New York Times analysis in December 2017 showed that even the preliminary data from the Demographic Registry of Puerto Rico indicated that hurricane-related deaths may have risen to 1,052, Gov. Ricardo Rosselló commissioned a study from George Washington University’s school of public health. The report is expected to be released this month. […]Researchers at Penn State University had reached an estimate very similar to The Times’ assessment. A much-publicized study from Harvard University showed the deaths could have ranged from 800 to 8,500. [more]

Puerto Rican Government Acknowledges Hurricane Death Toll of 1,427