Puerto Rico's governor says there will be 'hell to pay' if officials withheld mortality data

[Igel]

7. The first CNN article was better.

This one tries to pin a number on the researchers.

The "source" of this article is, of course, another CNN article, but at least that one tried a bit harder in stating, "Marqués and colleagues say 793 to 8,498 hurricane deaths occurred." https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/29/us/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-death-toll/index.html

And that's the problem with statistics. It won't give a number. The top and bottom numbers themselves have error bars associated with them.

One problem is what a death "due to" the hurricanes would look like. If somebody has a heart attack because the day after the storm hit they couldn't get through a blocked road and dies, is that due to the hurricane? The person might have died anyway. The strictest definition requires that the death be immediately caused by the storm: floodwaters, something falling on them, etc. This hypothetical heart-attack case? After the storm, therefore not immediately caused by the storm.

Then, apart from the bookkeeping aspect, there's the blame aspect. People need to minimize or maximize the death count for political or personal reasons. In that hypothetical case, no government would have been able to transfer manpower and materiel in sufficient quantity to clear all the streets, restore power, etc. Esp. since parts of the territory were still flooded. Even with Ike, part of the quick response was because a lot of supplies were pre-positioned near the suspected path of the storm and the roads were clear fairly quickly. There were land routes and they could haul trailers with ice and supplies from those places to Houston in 4-6 hours. Even then, some people were without power for weeks. (On the other hand, my apt. lost power at 11 pm and had it back around 5 pm the next day.) With PR, it took a day to get the airports open, and the sea ports remained closed for a while longer undergoing repairs.

The best that'll happen is there'll be a generally accepted number of deaths. But we'll argue over that for a while and try to appeal to authority and redefine things as necessary because politics. Of course, every redefinition makes it impossible to compare the death toll from any other hurricane, but that won't stop advantageous comparisons or damning comparisons.