
The woman, who was bedridden two years ago with a degenerative brain disease, developed bedsores following Hurricane María, when she could not turn on the air conditioning in her room due to lack of power. Likewise, sepsis, which has never been among the 10 leading causes of death in Puerto Rico - according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) - was the eighth leading cause of death during that period.ĭozens of stories of victims’ relatives tell how people bedridden and with diseases not related to the hurricane, such as bedsores or even a cavity, ended up dying of sepsis due to the unsafe and unhealthy temperatures and conditions that prevailed in hospitals, as well as the lack of treatment.Īmong them is Ramona González Muñoz, who died in her home of bedsores at age 59 after being denied treatment in three hospitals, according to her relatives. Try viewing this in a modern browser like Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Internet Explorer 9 or later. Your browser does not support the iframe HTML tag. Deaths among people over age 70, although more in net numbers, as they usually are, increased between 8% to 10%. This contrasts to the widely believed, government-backed perception that the elderly people and those with pre-existing medical conditions were the ones who mostly died. The debacle in the three months that followed the hurricane was of such magnitude that it changed the face of death in Puerto Rico, modifying the island’s demographics and main causes of death, yielded the investigation, which also included an analysis of the Demographic Registry’s mortality databases and thousands of death certificates obtained following a lawsuit filed by the CPI to obtain access to that information.Īccording to the data, the segment in which most deaths were recorded for the entire population, during the three months following the hurricane, was that of young adults of productive age, 30 to 44, with a percentage increase between 23% to 39%, compared to the average of the previous three years. Rosselló said when asked by the CPI during a press conference in late August over deaths related to Hurricane María. “How prepared are we for a hurricane such as María? Well, the truth is that if a hurricane of that nature comes, we will receive the same, a little less or a little bit more devastation. One year after Hurricane María, the risk of seeing this tragedy repeat itself is real as systemic failures in access to health services and infrastructure - which caused the majority of deaths - have not been corrected, according to experts interviewed, and also admitted by Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló. 6 to the time of Trump’s departure, 640 people had died in excess of the average number of deaths during that same period in the previous three years. According to the mortality statistics of the Puerto Rico Demographic Registry, from Sept. I love Puerto Rico!”, he tweeted.įor about four hours, President Trump visited Puerto Rico on Oct.

If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list.

Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000…This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. As time went by it did not go up by much. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. “3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. President Donald Trump - who has downplayed the magnitude of the catastrophe since the beginning and glorified his response level - said on Thursday that the estimate of deaths validated by the government of Puerto Rico and produced by George Washington University (GWU) is yet another fabrication from Democrats to make him look bad. The existing list is that of the Government of Puerto Rico which still includes only 64 deaths.

The latter is evidenced by the only comprehensive record available of the deaths related to the hurricane, documented by a joint investigation of the Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI), Quartz (QZ) and Associated Press (AP). Four hundred and eighty seven stories of extreme and inhuman suffering, each one with its own name, prove that many of the deaths caused by Hurricane María could have been avoided, while revealing the causes that led to this historic rise in mortality in Puerto Rico.
