Last December, a week before the holiday break, I received a call from the government of Puerto Rico seeking a meeting to discuss Hurricane Maria and its aftermath. The tweets suggested a political motive for our study’s finding of 2,975 excess deaths in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. It was based on a careful examination of all of the deaths officially reported to the government of Puerto Rico between September 2017 and February 2018. Of these, only the estimate by the government of Puerto Rico involved the examination of individual deaths to determine if the hurricane had caused them. We do not know the exact circumstances around each of the 2,975 excess deaths that occurred.

Source: Washington Post September 15, 2018 14:03 UTC