"What is your death count?" Donald Trump asked Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Rosselló last October.
In other words, the revised figure rose 186 times over the initial one in less than a year, with most of the deaths occurring long after the hurricane departed and dissipated.
Based on this rate of increase, The American Spectator can exclusively report that within two years the estimates of the number of Hurricane Maria deaths in Puerto Rico will reach 103,000,000, a figure roughly 30 times the population of the island commonwealth.
Will Donald Trump still recalcitrantly stick to a death count in the double or triple digits when the number of victims exceeds the population of the Philippines?
It seems hard to believe that a tropical cyclone, initially blamed for dozens of deaths months after it hit on September 20, 2017, actually killed more human beings than any other hurricane that occurred in the 20th or 21st centuries.
Did Hurricane Maria really kill two or three times as many people as Hurricane Katrina did? Why do people who stick to a number appear to impugn their credibility more than those whose estimates fluctuate wildly? And what explains the discrepancy between the modest initial figures and the massive subsequent ones?
Academics Alexis Santos and Jeffrey Howard say the hurricane caused 1,085 deaths.
The New Republic figure came from a Harvard University study, which relied on "a representative stratified random sample of 3299 households," not on official certificates or anything else indicating cause of death.
The George Washington University study, like the estimates offered by Harvard and the two Puerto Rican professors, similarly relies heavily on comparing death rates in Puerto Rico in the months that followed Maria to rates in previous years, automatically assigning death-by-hurricane status to fatalities above the historical norm for the period.
Put another way, people critical of Donald Trump's response to the disaster judge his administration's response by a new standard that inflates the body count beyond what the actual storm inflicted by including deaths that occurred months later for reasons tangentially, some not at all, related to Maria.
The Harvard University study admits, "In the United States, death certificates are the primary source of mortality statistics, and in most jurisdictions, death can be attributed to disasters only by medical examiners. Survey-based studies can therefore provide important complementary population-level metrics in the wake of natural disasters, despite inherent limitations associated with the nature of participant-reported data, recall bias, nonresponse bias, and survivor bias."
https://spectator.org/hurricane-hot-air/
In other words, the revised figure rose 186 times over the initial one in less than a year, with most of the deaths occurring long after the hurricane departed and dissipated.
Based on this rate of increase, The American Spectator can exclusively report that within two years the estimates of the number of Hurricane Maria deaths in Puerto Rico will reach 103,000,000, a figure roughly 30 times the population of the island commonwealth.
Will Donald Trump still recalcitrantly stick to a death count in the double or triple digits when the number of victims exceeds the population of the Philippines?
It seems hard to believe that a tropical cyclone, initially blamed for dozens of deaths months after it hit on September 20, 2017, actually killed more human beings than any other hurricane that occurred in the 20th or 21st centuries.
Did Hurricane Maria really kill two or three times as many people as Hurricane Katrina did? Why do people who stick to a number appear to impugn their credibility more than those whose estimates fluctuate wildly? And what explains the discrepancy between the modest initial figures and the massive subsequent ones?
Academics Alexis Santos and Jeffrey Howard say the hurricane caused 1,085 deaths.
The New Republic figure came from a Harvard University study, which relied on "a representative stratified random sample of 3299 households," not on official certificates or anything else indicating cause of death.
The George Washington University study, like the estimates offered by Harvard and the two Puerto Rican professors, similarly relies heavily on comparing death rates in Puerto Rico in the months that followed Maria to rates in previous years, automatically assigning death-by-hurricane status to fatalities above the historical norm for the period.
Put another way, people critical of Donald Trump's response to the disaster judge his administration's response by a new standard that inflates the body count beyond what the actual storm inflicted by including deaths that occurred months later for reasons tangentially, some not at all, related to Maria.
The Harvard University study admits, "In the United States, death certificates are the primary source of mortality statistics, and in most jurisdictions, death can be attributed to disasters only by medical examiners. Survey-based studies can therefore provide important complementary population-level metrics in the wake of natural disasters, despite inherent limitations associated with the nature of participant-reported data, recall bias, nonresponse bias, and survivor bias."
https://spectator.org/hurricane-hot-air/
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