Puerto Rico Orders Review and Recount of Hurricane Deaths

[DonViejo]

Source: The New York Times




By PATRICIA MAZZEIDEC. 18, 2017

Facing mounting evidence that Puerto Rico has vastly undercounted the number of people who died because of Hurricane Maria, Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló ordered on Monday that every death on the island since the calamitous storm be reviewed.

Officials will look again at all deaths attributed to natural causes after the hurricane, which made landfall Sept. 20 and knocked out power to 3.4 million Puerto Ricans — and to their hospitals and clinics. Parts of the island are still without power almost three months later, and the power grid is operating at only 70 percent of capacity.

The prolonged blackout hampered critical medical treatment for some of the island’s most vulnerable patients, including many who were bedridden or dependent on dialysis or respirators. But if they died as a result, the storm’s role in their deaths may have gone officially unrecorded.

“This is about more than numbers, these are lives: real people, leaving behind loved ones and families,” Mr. Rosselló said in a statement.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/us/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-death-toll-review.html

[bluecollar2]

1. good....n/t

[Hortensis]

2. Good! These are American citizens. We owe to them

and very much to the survivors this final respect and accountability for our systems.

An ancillary article in Carnegie Endowment and Rule of Law about problems with counting deaths around the world is interesting, though not about Puerto Rico. The author is no friend of the government administrations that are hiding what happened in Puerto Rico, btw.

http://carnegieendowment.org/2017/10/12/why-is-it-so-difficult-to-count-dead-people-pub-73382

[2naSalit]

3. Good! ...nt

[Tom Rinaldo]

4. Not so Good

Put this in the category of better late than never, but not good. When this report comes out, it will be a news crawl on cable news screens for a few hours. It will make at best a below the fold front page story for a day in some papers and be buried on page four in others. It will be far too late to mobilize massive help for Puerto Rico and it will join the list of one hundred and ten major outrages perpetuated by the Trump regime. True death toll reports within a few weeks of the hurricane devastating Puerto Rico could have helped galvanize public opinion behind more emergency aid being delivered when additional deaths were more preventable.

I strongly suspect that some leaders in Puerto Rico gambled on a strategy of not making Trump look bad at the time so that they could appeal to his vanity with praise to try to win more support for Puerto Rico rather than angering him with the truth and getting further punished in return. They were put in a no win situation by a raging narcissist and predictably Puerto Rico lost.

[SunSeeker]

5. Fucking travesty. How was ANYONE able to quote the "official" number with a straight face?

[dembotoz]

6. about time