Hurricane Maria’s death toll in Puerto Rico is higher than official count, experts say
Cotté is one of the unaccounted victims of Maria, the potent hurricane that devastated all of Puerto Rico with sustained winds and gusts of up to 200 miles per hour. On Wednesday, the Puerto Rico government, maintained that the official number of deaths as a result of the catastrophe was 16. But the Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI, for its initials in Spanish) has confirmed that there are dozens of hurricane-related deaths and the number could rise to the hundreds.
The storm-related fatalities are mounting with each passing day, and official numbers are not counting patients who are not receiving dialysis, oxygen and other essential services.
The dead are at the hospital morgues, which are at capacity and in remote places where the government has yet to go. In many cases, families are unaware of the deaths. The government’s Demographic Registry is responsible for certifying deaths so bodies can be removed by funeral homes, many of which are not operating because of lack of resources. The agency began to certify some of the dead Monday, Health Secretary Rafael Rodríguez-Mercado confirmed in an interview.
Public Safety Secretary Héctor Pesquera told the CPI that the names of the dead because of the hurricane will not be revealed until relatives can be notified.
CPI sources in half a dozen hospitals said those bodies are piling up at the morgues of the 69 hospitals in Puerto Rico, of which 70 percent are not operating. The majority of the hospital morgues that provided information — including Doctor’s Center in Bayamón and Santurce, Pavía Hospital in Santurce, Manatí Medical Center, Dr. Pila in Ponce, Río Piedras Medical Center, Mayagüez Medical Center and the HIMA hospitals in Caguas and Bayamón — are at full capacity.
CPI also has learned that the Institute of Forensic Sciences is also full of bodies and that 25 of those are hurricane victims. On Tuesday, the IFS reported that it had increased its storage capacity for bodies with a trailer that was obtained through The Morgue federal program.
It’s unclear what is happening with the deceased who are at the morgues of the 51 hospitals that have had to close their doors.
Secretary Rodríguez-Mercado acknowledged that hospital morgues are full. He said the accumulated bodies cannot be removed from the morgues by funeral homes until the deaths can be certified by the Demographic Registry, which barely began operating from regional emergency centers Monday.
“We’re finding dead people, people who have been buried, [people] have made common graves,” Rodríguez-Mercado told CPI. “We’ve been told people have buried their family members because they’re in places that have yet to be reached.”
Hospitals that had to close their doors after the storm have more than 4,000 beds. Asked what happened to those patients, where they were transferred, the health secretary responded with a sincere, “I don’t know.”
Another looming problem is that patients are arriving in critical condition, with ventilators, for example, and with poorly documented records of medical procedures at the hospitals where patients were originally admitted.
Meanwhile, the dead continue to accumulate.
“We’re fighting. I would love for the government to understand that it has to open dialysis centers. If they don’t receive the service, the patients’ health is compromised quickly and they die. And yes, they have died,” said Armando Rodríguez, vice president of the Grupo HIMA medical provider. He confirmed that the morgues of his two hospitals in Bayamón and Caguas are above capacity.
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And remember, only 7% of the island has power. The bodies are piling up. This might be much worse than the 1800 after Katrina. In fact, because of people buried, swept out to sea and buried in mass graves in remote areas, we may never know how many actually died.
But with so many bodies not buried, there will be disease. People are already drinking out of creeks and bathing in dirty water.
Trump won't be able to shrug this off with jokes and "have fun". The Mayor will be vindicated and Trump will come out of this as an even worse racist who is dangerously inept.