In a pair of tweets casting doubt on the official estimate of nearly 3,000 deaths, the president clung to an outdated estimate, wrongly suggested that doubt over the figure emerged “a long time later” and inaccurately characterized the new figure as including all deaths on the island.
What Was Said
the facts
President Trump rejected the official estimate from the Puerto Rico government that nearly 3,000 people died from Hurricane Maria through a series of misleading or false claims on Thursday.
He cited an outdated tally that officials had acknowledged almost immediately was too low, misleadingly suggested that doubt over the tally did not emerge until “a long time later,” accused Democrats, without evidence, of inflating the figures and wrongly described the current official estimate as counting all deaths on the island, regardless of whether they were related to the storm.
The 3,000 figure comes from an estimate in a study by independent researchers at George Washington University and commissioned by the Puerto Rico government.
The researchers found that government data documented 16,608 deaths from September 2017 to February 2018 — 2,975 more deaths than under predicted mortality rates. In other words, researchers explicitly tried to avoid counting people who “died for any reason, like old age.”
The study noted that the previous government estimate of 64 deaths was low because the figure accounted only for deaths directly caused by the storm, such as “those caused by structural collapse, flying debris, floods and drownings.”
Hours after the study was released in late August, the government of Puerto Rico revised its estimated death toll to 2,975 people.
Even if Mr. Trump has expressed doubts, at least five other independent analyses — using a number of methodologies and examining varying amounts of time elapsed since the hurricane made landfall — pin the toll around 1,000 or more, magnitudes larger than the six to 18 deaths he cited.
That figure appears to refer to Puerto Rico’s initial estimate of the toll at 16, which was released several days after the storm made landfall on the island on Sept. 20,2017. It was updated to 34 in early October 2017, a day after Mr. Trump visited the island. The estimate was again revised to 64 in December 2017, and Puerto Rico announced it would commission a recount that same month.
The “very large numbers” from independent analyses — not Democrats — began to emerge in fall and winter 2017, but the official estimates were met with widespread skepticism from news organizations and public health experts from the start. And even Puerto Rican officials have acknowledged that their tallies underestimated the number of deaths from Hurricane Maria since the initial count.
John Mutter, a professor at Columbia University and expert on disaster mortality, said he never bought into the official tally, given how difficult it is to evacuate from an island.
“No serious academic who studies this stuff thought that was plausible. It was implausibly small,” he said. In contrast, Mr. Mutter said, the George Washington University estimate and others like it produced much more believable counts.
Here’s a timeline of how the official tally has shifted, when independent estimates were published and how Puerto Rican officials have responded:
Source: George Washington University, John Mutter, The New York Times, The Miami Herald, CNN, research from Alexis R. Santos, Center for Investigative Journalism, National Hurricane Center, whitehouse.gov, The Royal Statistical Society
