How many people died in Hurricane Maria? It’s up for debate

How many people died from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico? It’s up for debate

Welcome to Plain English, episode number 54. I’m Jeff and this is the podcast that goes at just the right speed for all of you who are learning English. On today’s episode, a new study from Harvard University estimates the death toll from Hurricane Maria is over 4,600. That’s quite a bit more than the official count, which is 64. At the end of the episode, I’ll show you how to use the very common English phrase, “go without.”

Since today’s episode is number 54, that means the transcript for today’s program is online at PlainEnglish.com/54. Today’s episode has a lot of numbers in it, and I know numbers are hard to follow in English, so this might be a good time to check the transcript. And remember if you speak Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Chinese, you can take advantage of the instant translations of difficult words and phrases. So if you are looking to improve your English vocabulary and you want to make sure you never miss a word or phrase from the episode, head over to PlainEnglish.com/54 and check out the transcripts.

New study on Maria’s death toll

How many people in Puerto Rico died from Hurricane Maria? The government says 64 people, but a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine says it was actually over 4,600—about 70 times higher than the official count.

Let me give you the background. Hurricane Maria was one of the worst natural disasters in American history. It hit Puerto Rico in September 2017, over six months ago, with 155-mile-per hour winds and intense flooding. The storm was a direct hit; it was the worst nightmare of anyone who lives in the Caribbean. People died in floods, mudslides, collapsed houses, and from health problems afterward.

Households on the island went an average of 68 days without water service at home and an average of 84 days without electricity. Cell phone service was also interrupted. Eighty-four days is almost three months and that was the average time without electricity for households on the island; many went much longer and some still don’t have power today, six months later.

You can imagine that people’s health would suffer under conditions like that—no fresh water at home, and with no electricity, you can’t store fresh food in the refrigerator. What’s worse, though, is that some people need electricity to power medical devices in their homes—respirators, for example.

And that’s just the impact on houses. Think about the impact on hospitals and doctors’ offices. There were stories of doctors performing surgeries in the dark and surveys showed that many people had trouble reaching a hospital that was open or calling an ambulance.

So the question of how many people died from Hurricane Maria is actually not an easy one to answer. It’s widely known that the official government estimate of 64 people is a dramatic under-statement. But compiling these statistics hasn’t been a priority for the Puerto Rico government, so private researchers have attempted to fill the gap.

A team from the Harvard School of Public Health is the latest to publish a study on the death toll from Hurricane Maria. Here’s how they made their estimates. They started with a concept of an “excess death.” What they were trying to measure is, how many more people died during and after the storm than otherwise would be expected to die during that period?

First, they needed to find out the total number of people who died on the island. They did that by going door-to-door to about 3,000 households and interviewing people about who had died since the storm. Based on this sample, they estimated how many people died on the whole island during that period.

Then they needed to compare the number of people who died to the number that would otherwise be expected if there were not a storm. They were able to do this by looking at public records from the past.

Everything was done on a proportional basis, so they measured the number of expected deaths and the number of actual deaths per 1,000 people. In a normal year, they would have expected 8.8 deaths per 1,000 people, but after the storm there were between 10 and 19 deaths per 1,000 people. The researchers concluded that between about 800 and 8,500 additional people died due to the storm. The midpoint of that range was their conclusion, which was 4,645. They published their report at the end of May.

You have to admit their conclusion was a very wide range—somewhere between 800 and 8,500 is not a very precise answer. Other researchers from Pennsylvania State University did a similar study and concluded that the number of people who died from the storm and its aftermath was 1,100, which is at the lower end of Harvard’s estimate. The government commissioned its own survey from a different university and those estimates will be released in the future.

The exact number may never be known, in part because you can’t pinpoint whether each death was specifically attributable to the storm or not. For example, Hurricane Katrina, which hit the US city of New Orleans in 2005, killed over 1,800 people, but that is just an estimate, too. In the case of Hurricane Maria, though, it is important to recognize that the number much higher than what the government has acknowledged so far.

I want to say thank you to Juan for suggesting this topic. He sent me links to several articles on the topic. He also pointed out that not all the news is negative. The insurance money is starting to come in and an economic recovery package was passed by the US government in February, so hopefully the economy starts to turn around from those two positive impacts. Thanks to Juan for sending me those articles. In the course of researching the program today, I learned a lot that I didn’t know before.

I also want to say hi and thank you to a few people. Marilia from Brazil left a nice review of the program on Facebook and she said she’s going to use Plain English to teach her Dad English, which I think is great. So hello to Marilia and Marilia’s dad. Also hello and thank you to Rebecca from Brazil for sending me a nice note this week.

I love it when people suggest topics, like Juan did this week so please send me some suggestions from where you live. You can find me on Facebook or Twitter under the user name PlainEnglishPod or send an email to [email protected].