Almost 5,000 people died in Puerto Rico due to Hurricane Maria in 2017, according to a new study released Tuesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
"Our results indicate that the official death count of 64 is a substantial underestimate of the true burden of mortality after Hurricane Maria," the authors, led by a team of scientists from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, wrote in the study.
They relied on a survey of 3,299 random households in Puerto Rico that asked occupants about their experiences during and after the storm, from Sept. 20 to Dec. 31, 2017.
They concluded that an estimated 4,645 "excess deaths," or deaths that would otherwise not have happened, took place in Puerto Rico because of the storm. According to their calculations, there is a 95 percent chance that 800 to 8,500 people died due to the storm, with 5,000 a likely figure. The official death count is 64.
Out of the 3,299 households, 38 reported a death. The researchers then extrapolated that figure to the total population of Puerto Rico, which is 3.4 million people. By subtracting the number of deaths during the same period of time in 2016, researchers found that the mortality rate spiked 62 percent during those three months.
"Our approach is complementary to that and it provides a different kind of estimate and a different kind of insight into the impact of the hurricane," Caroline Buckee, one of the study’s leading authors and an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told NPR, which notes that the household survey is a widely recognized method for conducting a casualty estimate in the wake of a disaster, though it can be misleading if the survey isn’t truly random, or if some households have been completely eliminated.
The Harvard team admits that their result is "likely to be an underestimate" because some households were wiped out by the storm.
"Hurricane Maria caused massive infrastructural damage to Puerto Rico," reads the study. "In our survey, interruption of medical care was the primary cause of sustained high mortality rates in the months following the hurricane," the wrote.
"Hospitals and doctors struggled to provide care, and many people simply had trouble getting to the doctor or the hospital to seek medical care. The survey finds that one-third of the total deaths in the months following the storm were caused by delayed or interrupted health care."
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