W*****B
发帖数: 4796 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 Military 讨论区 】
发信人: WCNMLGB (CCC), 信区: Military
标 题: 波多黎各的电力回复没有？
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Mon Dec 18 15:41:27 2017, 美东)
都好几个月了，还是老样子。人民估计也习惯了没电的日子。这样可以有时间亲戚邻里
更多的促膝谈心交流。突然来电了，可能还要不适应了吧。
还有瞒报死亡人数。
Puerto Rico Orders Review and Recount of Hurricane Deaths
Facing mounting evidence that Puerto Rico has vastly undercounted the number
of people who died because of Hurricane Maria, Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló
ordered on Monday that every death on the island since the calamitous storm
be reviewed.
Officials will look again at all deaths attributed to natural causes after
the hurricane, which made landfall Sept. 20 and knocked out power to 3.4
million Puerto Ricans — and to their hospitals and clinics. Parts of the
island are still without power almost three months later, and the power grid
is operating at only 70 percent of capacity.
The prolonged blackout hampered critical medical treatment for some of the
island’s most vulnerable patients, including many who were bedridden or
dependent on dialysis or respirators. But if they died as a result, the
storm’s role in their deaths may have gone officially unrecorded.
“This is about more than numbers, these are lives: real people, leaving
behind loved ones and families,” Mr. Rosselló said in a statement.
The governor acknowledged on Monday that the death toll “may be higher than
the official count certified to date” — an apparent about-face for his
administration, which has spent months stubbornly defending its counting
method, even as it became obvious that it did not reflect the unusually high
death rate in Puerto Rico after the storm.
Several news organizations, including The New York Times, conducted
independent analyses and found that the number of deaths traceable to the
storm was probably far higher than the official count of 64.
The Times’s review, based on daily mortality data from Puerto Rico’s vital
statistics bureau, found that 1,052 more people than usual had died across
the island in the 42 days after Maria struck. The analysis compared daily
figures for 2017 with an average of figures for the corresponding days in
2015 and 2016.
Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism reached a similar
estimate, that 1,065 more people than usual had died in September and
October. CNN compiled figures from half the island’s funeral homes to
report that funeral directors believed that 499 more deaths than the
official count were tied to the hurricane.
↗ Graphic: Official Toll in Puerto Rico: 64. Actual Deaths May Be 1,052.
Officially, 64 people died because of the storm, but an analysis by The New
York Times suggests that the actual number is substantially higher.
Official mortality figures from all causes on the island are revised often
as the government obtains more information about events after the storm.
Since The Times published its analysis on Dec. 8, Puerto Rico has recorded
seven more deaths that happened in September and 31 more for October.
Methods for counting storm deaths vary by state and locality. In some places
, officials include only direct deaths, such as people who drown in storm
floodwaters. Puerto Rico’s method is not that restrictive; the medical
examiner includes some deaths indirectly caused by a storm, such as suicides.
The leading causes of death on the island in September were diabetes and
Alzheimer’s disease, Puerto Rican government data show. But there was a
sharp spike — by 50 percent — in the number of recorded deaths from sepsis
, a complication of severe infection that can be tied to delayed medical
care or poor living conditions.
Reviewing the circumstances surrounding each death will require interviewing
family members and doctors who signed death certificates to find out if,
for example, a heart attack might have been brought on by stress from the
hurricane, or might have been fatal because an ambulance could not get
through debris-blocked streets in time to help.
Harry Figueroa, a 58-year-old teacher, died in Caguas on Oct. 4 from
pneumonia, and his family blamed the power outage for his death. His
daughter, Lisandra M. Figueroa, said her father was obese and needed the
help of a CPAP machine to keep breathing safely while asleep, but it would
not work without power.
“Between the dust, the rain and the heat, he kept getting sicker,” said Ms
. Figueroa, 30.
She was skeptical that the government could adequately investigate all of
the cases like his on the island.
“I don’t know if it will be possible, because of the chaos in this country
,” she said. “I don’t know how they’re going to do that. They’re going
to have to request autopsies of all the bodies.”
That would no longer be possible in many cases. In the first four weeks
after the storm, Puerto Rico authorized 911 cremations of people whose
deaths were attributed to natural causes.
Mr. Rosselló had previously said that his government would look into
questionably attributed deaths reported by the news media. Pressure mounted
last week when two Democratic members of Congress, Nydia M. Velazquez of New
York and Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, asked the Government
Accountability Office to review the hurricane death toll in Puerto Rico and
the United States Virgin Islands.
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On Monday, the governor said he welcomed the published reviews of the death
toll, but he cautioned that the government could not adjust its official
mortality count based on “statistical analysis.”
“Every life is more than a number, and every death must have a name and
vital information attached to it, as well as an accurate accounting of the
facts related to their passing,” he said.
Getting the death toll right is important for disaster planning, according
to Alexis Santos, director of the graduate program in applied demography at
Penn State University.
“This is not a vanity exercise,” said Mr. Santos, who is Puerto Rican. “
Effective assessment of climate disasters is the only way we can prevent
loss of life in future events.”
The death toll can be a metric of economic development: Poorer localities
tend to have more deaths and fewer economic losses after disasters than
wealthier places, according to John Mutter, a professor at Columbia
University who studied deaths from the 2010 Haiti earthquake and Hurricane
Katrina in 2005.
“It’s a measure of how well you protected your people, and Puerto Rico is
in this odd position where it’s not a state, their people are citizens, and
were it a state, it would be the poorest state in the nation,” he said.
For weeks after the storm, top leaders of Puerto Rico’s government insisted
that its count of the dead was accurate and not significantly low. On Sept.
29, nine days after Maria made landfall, Héctor M. Pesquera, Puerto Rico’
s public safety secretary, said he did not think the count would rise by
much. Four days later, President Trump visited the island and remarked that
the death toll — which officially stood at 16 at the time — was much lower
than the 1,833 people who died in 2005 because of Hurricane Katrina.
Mr. Pesquera repeatedly said that Puerto Rico hewed to the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention’s protocols for counting storm-related
deaths, and urged families to share information with the authorities about
any deaths that may be linked to the storm.
But he also dismissed questions about whether the government had an
obligation to look into the surge in deaths attributed to natural causes
after the storm. When the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, said in a
Nov. 4 television interview that Maria’s toll might be 500, and not 55, the
official count at the time, Mr. Pesquera called her statement “
irresponsible.” On Monday, his spokeswoman directed requests for comment to
Governor Rosselló’s office.
“We always expected that the number of hurricane-related deaths would
increase as we received more factual information — not hearsay — and this
review will ensure we are correctly counting everybody,” Mr. Rosselló said
in his statement on Monday.
Follow Patricia Mazzei on Twitter: @PatriciaMazzei.
Frances Robles contributed reporting.
RELATED COVERAGE
Graphic: Official Toll in Puerto Rico: 64. Actual Deaths May Be 1,052. Dec.
8, 2017
When a Hurricane Hits Home: Life in Puerto Rico After Maria Dec. 13, 2017
Rebuilding Puerto Rico, One Small Gesture at a Time Dec. 17, 2017
The Next Crisis for Puerto Rico: A Crush of Foreclosures Dec. 16, 2017
Get the full New York Times experience
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