He threw some paper towels at their heads and left
by digby
I think we all knew it was bad. But these numbers represent a whole lot of people who didn’t have to die if the government had put the kind of effort into recovery that it put into other hurricane disaster areas:
Experts who work in disaster death toll assessment also raised red flags early on about the Puerto Rican government’s lack of clarity on how it was determining what was — and what was not — a hurricane-related death.
Puerto Rico’s Department of Public Safety told BuzzFeed News in October that it was not using any specific guidelines for deciding what was counted as a hurricane-related death.
Tuesday’s report reiterates that the lack of clear direction about how to record and report hurricane-related deaths led to a significant undercount by officials.
“Although direct causes of death are easier to assign by medical examiners, indirect deaths resulting from worsening of chronic conditions or from delayed medical treatments may not be captured on death certificates,” the researchers wrote.
John Mutter, a professor of earth sciences and public affairs at Columbia University who studied how the death count was handled after Hurricane Katrina, said that the methodology used in the Harvard study was “very sound.”
“That is an astonishing undercount,” Mutter told BuzzFeed News. “Something has gone terribly wrong here if they have a 70-times-higher death rate.”
President Donald Trump, during his visit to the island in October, used the relatively low official death toll — which was then at 16 people — as a measure of how Puerto Rico had not experienced a “real catastrophe” akin to what New Orleans suffered following Hurricane Katrina.
He was so proud of “his” hurricanes not killing as many people as George W. Bush’s did.
But that was just another lie.
.