Hurricane Maria killed nearly 3,000 in Puerto Rico

San Juan : Hurricane Maria killed nearly 3,000 people in Puerto Rico in the desperate, sweltering months after the storm — almost double the previous government estimate — with the elderly and impoverished hit hardest, according to an independent study ordered by the US territory. The new estimate of 2,975 dead in the six months after Maria devastated the island in September 2017 and knocked out the entire electrical grid was made by researchers with the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University. It was released Tuesday.

“We are hopeful that the government will accept this as an official death toll,” said Lynn Goldman, dean of the institute. “A lesson from this is that efforts for assistance and recovery need to focus as much as possible on lower-income areas, on people who are older, who are more vulnerable.” The finding is almost twice the government’s previous estimate, included in a recent report to Congress, that there were 1,427 more deaths than normal in the three months after the storm.

The George Washington researchers said the official count from the Sept. 20 hurricane was low in part because doctors were not trained in how to classify deaths after a disaster. The number of deaths from September 2017 to February 2018 was 22 percent higher than the same period in previous years, Goldman said.