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The actual death toll inflicted by Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico is closer to 4,700 than the official government count of 64 — an astounding 73-fold increase, according to a new Harvard University study.
A Harvard research team surveyed nearly 3,300 randomly chosen Puerto Rican households and extrapolated their findings to estimate that the island likely saw 4,645 “excess deaths” between the storm’s Sept. 20, 2017, landfall and the end of the calendar year.
Factoring in “excess deaths” — deaths that would not have occurred had the island not found itself in a prolonged disaster in the storm’s wake — there is a 95% likelihood that the actual death toll sits between 800 and 8,500, according to the study published Tuesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
The 4,645 figure represents an estimate within that range.
Much of the U.S. territory was left without electricity as the Category 4 storm whipped across the island, downing power lines and crippling the grid.
Three months after the devastating squall blew through, more than 660,000 residents were still in the dark.
“The timely estimation of the death toll after a natural disaster is critical to defining the scale and severity of the crisis and to targeting interventions for recovery,” the scientists wrote in the study. “As the United States prepares for its next hurricane season, it will be critical to review how disaster-related deaths will be counted, in order to mobilize an appropriate response operation and account for the fate of those affected.”