Originally posted by Sparko
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Let's say an elderly person in somewhat poor health, after the hurricane lived without power for several months and drank water of dubious quality, and their health deteriorated during this time and they finally died of an infection. Their cause of death will be listed as something along the lines of infection / old age / natural causes. Did that person die as a result of the hurricane? Was it specifically the poor water quality that caused the infection? Did their health deteriorate due to the lack of power? Or was it that they were just old and were deteriorating anyway and caught a bug and died? For any given person it is often impossible to make that determination. Even with talking to their family and their doctors you often wouldn't be able to figure out whether they would have died without the hurricane. That method would be literally guessing in each case.
But what is a much more reliable method that doesn't require case-by-case guessing is the aggregate numbers. Looking at how much the body count in PR spiked after the hurricane compared to its normal levels tells you how many people died because of the hurricane and doesn't require random guessing with individual cases as to whether a death with multiple causes was "hurricane caused" or not. So rather than go out on a limb and guess whether specific people died due to the hurricane versus not, instead the researchers content themselves with saying they can see from the numbers of death certificates issued that 2,658 to 3,290 more people died in PR after the hurricane than normally die in PR in the same time period. That number is then a much more accurate representation of the number of hurricane-induced deaths than guessing about individual cases would amount to.
P.S. I thought Paul Ryan's press conference about the hurricane deaths today was decent:
Paul Ryan:
I have no reason to dispute these numbers.
I was in Puerto Rico after the hurricane. It was a horrible storm. I toured the entire island. And it's an isolated island that lost its infrastructure and its power for a long time. You couldn't get to people for a long time on the island because roads were washed out, power was gone, and the casualties mounted for a long time. So I have no reason to dispute those numbers.
Those are just the facts of what happens when a horrible hurricane hits an isolated place like an island.
I have no reason to dispute these numbers.
I was in Puerto Rico after the hurricane. It was a horrible storm. I toured the entire island. And it's an isolated island that lost its infrastructure and its power for a long time. You couldn't get to people for a long time on the island because roads were washed out, power was gone, and the casualties mounted for a long time. So I have no reason to dispute those numbers.
Those are just the facts of what happens when a horrible hurricane hits an isolated place like an island.
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