The following article by Arelis R. Hernández, Samantha Schmidt and Joel Achenbach was posted on the Washington Post website August 28, 2018:
Following the release of a report, Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló raised the island’s official toll from Hurricane Maria from 64 to 2,975 on Aug. 28. (Ricardo Rossello)
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Hurricane Maria’s devastation in Puerto Rico led to a spike in mortality across the U.S. territory, with an estimated 2,975 excess deaths in the six months after the storm made landfall in September 2017, according to a sweeping report from George Washington University released Tuesday.
The government of Puerto Rico on Tuesday embraced the GWU estimate as the official death toll, ranking Maria among the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history. For much of the past year, the government had formally acknowledged just 64 deaths from the hurricane, which ravaged much of the territory and destroyed critical infrastructure. The spike in mortality came as the territory dealt with widespread and lengthy power outages, a lack of access to adequate health care, water insecurity and diseases related to the crisis.
The new study, requested by the governor of Puerto Rico, examined an unusually long period of time following the storm — six months — in an attempt to detect the hurricane’s lingering, indirect effects on mortality. The investigation looked at the total number of deaths from September 2017 through February 2018, and compared it with typical death rates, adjusting for many variables, including the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans who evacuated the territory after the storm struck on Sept. 20.