As always, that can be used to a political advantage.<\/b>
\nWhen President Trump visited Puerto Rico earlier this month, he emphasized one metric in an effort to demonstrate that the recovery effort was going well.
\u201cEvery death is a horror,\u201d he said. \u201cBut if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here with, really, a storm that was just totally overpowering \u2014 nobody has ever seen anything like this.\u201d
\u201cWhat is your death count, as of this moment,\u201d he asked the island\u2019s governor. \u201cSeventeen?\u201d
\u201cSixteen,\u201d Gov. Ricardo Rossello replied.
\u201cSixteen people certified. Sixteen people versus in the thousands,\u201d Trump said. \u201cYou can be very proud of all of your people, all of our people working together. Sixteen versus literally thousands of people. You can be very proud.\u201d
Trump\u2019s reinforcement of that figure had a very specific aim. His administration had been heavily criticized for its response to the disaster and, by comparing the death toll from Maria to 2005\u2019s Hurricane Katrina \u2014 for which his predecessor, George W. Bush, was similarly critiqued \u2014 Trump was trying to show that those concerns were overblown. That all had gone well.
By the time Trump had boarded Air Force One for the return flight to the mainland last week, that number had already more than doubled to 34. As of writing the toll is 45 \u2014 but it\u2019s clear that the number will go up.
Earlier this week, BuzzFeed reported that funeral homes on the island had a number of corpses that weren\u2019t included in the official death count. Some of those deaths weren\u2019t related to the hurricane; people die every day. Some, it seems, were.
The question that arises, then, is: How are those fatality counts determined? What counts as a death from the storm and what doesn\u2019t? And to what extent could an administration eager to keep that figure low put its finger on the scale?
To answer that question, The Washington Post spoke by phone with two professors at the University of Delaware, Joe Trainor and Benigno Aguirre, who work with the school\u2019s Disaster Recovery Center .
To the core question \u2014 how do we determine exactly how many people died because of Maria \u2014 Trainor offered a sobering response.
\u201cI think the answer is less satisfying than most people would expect,\u201d he said. \u201cThe reality is, we probably will never know.\u201d
The Centers for Disease Control\u2019s National Center for Health Statistics collects data related to deaths due to natural disasters, Trainor said. There\u2019s even a form that gets filled out.
But that\u2019s further down the line. A representative for the CDC told The Post over email that \u201cNCHS is not involved in producing the initial casualty estimates. They rely on death certificates, which tend to take longer to process.\u201d
Those certificates are themselves open to interpretation.
\u201cThe official designation of any single individual\u2019s death is really managed by the coroner at that specific place, or the medical official,\u201d Trainor said. \u201cAnd typically it doesn\u2019t say \u2018hurricane\u2019 \u2014 it\u2019s going to list whatever the medical condition that led to their death was.\u201d
\u201cThe long and short of it is, no matter what system exists, there\u2019s a lot of gray involved in how you will attribute any specific death during this time period,\u201d he added, \u201cwhether you decide it\u2019s directly or indirectly related to the event itself.\u201d
Aguirre spoke to that.
\u201cIf the hurricane happened on day one and the death happens two or three days after or during it, it\u2019s more likely those deaths will be counted as a result of the hurricane,\u201d he said. \u201cOn the other hand, if it happened two or three weeks afterwards, then you have the problem that perhaps it\u2019s not the case there\u2019s a relationship.\u201d
The type of death matters. A building weakened by the storm collapses on someone a week later or a person who can\u2019t access critical medicine dies, those seem like strong candidates for having been indirectly related to the storm. What about someone who dies of a heart attack after struggling to find shelter after his house was destroyed? Is that not related at all?
There are also deaths that won\u2019t be counted for other reasons. After the attacks of Sept. 11,2001, Aguirre learned that a number of undocumented immigrants worked in the Twin Towers and went missing after the buildings fell. Their families, though, were reticent to report those deaths to the government, so, from an official standpoint, those fatalities aren\u2019t included in the overall number \u2014 or in public memorials.
All of this means that there\u2019s leeway in how death totals are interpreted, some \u201ccases that are gray,\u201d in Trainor\u2019s words. That\u2019s exacerbated by the situation on the ground in Puerto Rico, which is a \u201cmixed bag\u201d in terms of the existing governmental infrastructure to tally deaths, in Aguirre\u2019s estimation.
At the same time, there\u2019s always a tension between the politics surrounding a natural disaster and official estimates of its effects.
\u201cIt\u2019s always the possibility of turning it into a political issue,\u201d Aguirre said. \u201cThat\u2019s not only in the case of the Trump administration but in many other governments that either minimize or maximize the effects.\u201d
In developing countries, he said, the number of deaths from disasters is often maximized to make the case for donations and support from the international community. In America, the political calculus is often different, Trainor said, with elected leaders often citing higher estimates for eventual death tolls that can then be revised downward.
\u201cYou don\u2019t want to be the mayor who says there could be 100,000 people dead and it turns out there are 200,000 people dead,\u201d he said. \u201cBut if you\u2019re the mayor who says there are 100,000 dead and it turns out to be 90, people don\u2019t get mad about that.\u201d
Trump erred on the low side for a political reason. Because of the nature of tallying fatalities, it\u2019s hard to say the extent to which the actual count will err on the low side as well.
Aguirre did offer one indirect defense of the administration.
\u201cFEMA during [2005\u2019s Hurricane] Katrina was accused of being a very bad actor because people died as a result of this,\u201d he said. \u201cBy and large, a lot of those claims were unjustified\u201d given the number of other factors at play.
Deeper questions about causes of death and ways in which disasters were made worse are \u201cimportant to ask,\u201d he noted.
\u201cMost people don\u2019t ask that. Most people like to apportion blame one way or the other, because politicians like clear answers and most people are accustomed to think that things are black-and-white.\u201d
Politicians do like clear answers but are often also happy to take advantage of uncertainty.
\u201cEvery system\u2019s got some gray space in terms of how it\u2019s implemented. There\u2019s typically some interpretive latitude given to administrations or interpretive latitude given to the individual specifically filling a role,\u201d Trainor said. \u201cIn any system there\u2019s going to be some variability. There\u2019s also going to be judgments. At the end of the day, there\u2019s going to be some cases that are gray that someone\u2019s going to have to say, \u2018Yeah, this one counts or this one doesn\u2019t count.\u2019 \u201d
In this case, that someone ultimately works for Trump.<\/p>\n

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Similarity rank: 7<\/div>\n

Sentiment rank: -1.9<\/div>\n

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