On Wednesday, amid Puerto Rico’s hurricane death toll controversy, President Donald Trump visited the Federal Emergency Management Agency for a briefing on the 2018 hurricane season. During his speech Trump mentioned Puerto Rico once, but not to discuss the shocking new report. Instead, Trump took the time to praise his administration’s efforts, “our entire government leapt into action to coordinate the response along with state and local leaders.”
Puerto Rico was hit by Hurricane Maria eight months ago. Maria destroyed homes, left 3.3 million people without power, water, and left the island’s health care system in tatters. According to the Puerto Rican government, it only took the lives of 64 people. However, a new Harvard University study on the death toll in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria published in the New England Journal of Medicine said the death toll was much, much higher.
According to the study, the number of deaths due to Hurricane Maria is anywhere between 793 to 8,498. While many news outlets have fixated on the number 4,645—according to Politifact more than 100 news articles used the figure in the headline—there is no one specific number. 4,645 simply falls in the middle of the range and is not more likely than any other number.
Following the report, the Puerto Rico Department of Health released new data that shows there were at least 1,400 additional deaths in the months after Hurricane Maria. The agency has declined to release final mortality data while investigators work on a Puerto Rican government commissioned study by the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health—the first phase of the study is expected to be done this summer.
It makes sense Trump hasn’t made a public remark about the new study. It is one of the darkest periods of his presidency; throughout the entire aftermath he failed to acknowledge the extent of the disaster, going as far as saying it wasn’t a “real catastrophe.” The fault for the lack of attention to this new appalling revelation isn’t his alone. Media follow up and popular discussion in the U.S. over the tragic situation in the island has been surprisingly low.
According to Media Matters, a liberal media watchdog, MSNBC and NBC only dedicated 21 minutes to the study but dedicated three hours and 39 minutes to covering Roseanne Barr’s racist twitter rant. Fox News gave the study only 48 seconds, but gave Barr two hours. In a poll by YouGov in late September, only 27% of Americans were following news about Hurricane Maria very closely. The same poll found that 43% and 39% of Americans were closely monitoring news about Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Harvey respectively. Could it have something to do with nearly half of Americans not knowing Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens?
