Official Toll in Puerto Rico: 62. Actual Deaths May Be 1,052.

[Eugene]

Source: New York Times

Official Toll in Puerto Rico: 62. Actual Deaths May Be 1,052.

By FRANCES ROBLES, KENAN DAVIS, SHERI FINK and SARAH ALMUKHTAR DEC. 8, 2017

Homes were flattened. Power was knocked out. And all across Puerto Rico, bodies began showing up at morgues.

Hurricane Maria pummeled Puerto Rico with great fury but the government there has reported an official death toll far lower than the devastation suggests.

A review by The New York Times of daily mortality data from Puerto Rico’s vital statistics bureau indicates a significantly higher death toll after the hurricane than the government there has acknowledged.

The Times’s analysis found that in the 42 days after Hurricane Maria made landfall on Sept. 20 as a Category 4 storm, 1,052 more people than usual died across the island. The analysis compared the number of deaths for each day in 2017 with the average of the number of deaths for the same days in 2015 and 2016.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/08/us/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-death-toll.html

[Igel]

1. There are probably more elegant ways of doing this.

But this is how I think of the death toll: statistically.

It captures those who didn't die because of the storm as well as deaths directly attributable to it. It captures deaths from stress or from being cut off from medication.

One has to take into account population growth, and also consider the "death toll" in the days immediately before the hurricane makes landfall to factor in the dead who don't make it to the morgue as quickly as they would.

It would be good to include trends and other factors--year-over-year comparisons usually show some variance in death rates because of secular trends or other things that affect health, from unemployment to water quality.

One downside to this, though, is the indirectness of many of the deaths. Many of those who died die a bit earlier than they would have--the elderly, infirm, ill. It also includes fools who do simply foolish things that lead to their demise. It makes blame harder to ascribe.

A second is that there are few good poster children for rhetorical point-scoring implicit in the analysis.

Still, it's far better from the specious attempts to say that everybody who died during the Maria aftermath is the result of the hurricane. As though people don't die every day, regardless, whether they're in ICUs or just watching tv at home. And the equally meaningless low-ball estimates that require strict causality to assert any claim of storm-relatedness.

[BigmanPigman]

2. ...and he threw paper towels at them. Fucking BASTARD!

[Stuart G]

3. k and r..