Puerto Rico has increased its official Hurricane Maria death toll to 2,97 in light of a new report by researchers from George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health.
The new figure is 46 times higher than the previous estimate released in December 2017, when the government claimed 64 people had died in the storm.
“We are using the best science available ... to be able to give a sense of closure to all of this,” Governor Ricardo Rossello said. “The truth is there is a lot of work to do.”
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CNN notes that the new death toll is “only an approximation, not a concrete list of names”.
New York congresswoman Nydia Velazquez said the report shows that the US response to Hurricane Maria failed the Puerto Rican people.
“These numbers are only the latest to underscore that the federal response to the hurricanes was disastrously inadequate and, as a result, thousands of our fellow American citizens lost their lives,” she said in a statement.
More than 8% of the population has left Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria struck in September last year, and the local government has struggled to rebuild its shattered infrastructure.
The island, home to more than 3.3 million US citizens, is “asking US Congress for $139bn (£108bn) in recovery funds”, the BBC reports
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