Puerto Rico's Hurricane Maria death toll may exceed 1,000

A medic checks on Kirk Thompson as U.S. Army 1st Special Force Command delivered food and water to him after he had not received any aid in the wake of the devastation left across the island — (Image credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The official count of Hurricane Maria-related deaths in Puerto Rico is 64, but independent investigations have suggested for months that this number may be too low. In early October, BuzzFeed News reported that funeral homes had "dozens" more bodies than the government had acknowledged, and in November, a CNN survey of funeral homes found reports of 499 dead.

A Saturday report from The New York Times indicates the true death toll may be higher still. By comparing Puerto Rico's normal mortality rate from previous years to the number of deaths reported in the aftermath of Maria, the Times concluded 1,052 people have died in connection to the storm.

"Before the hurricane, I had an average of 82 deaths daily," Wanda Llovet, director of the Demographic Registry in Puerto Rico, told the Times in a November interview. "Now I have an average of 118 deaths daily." The difference between those two figures are excess deaths the Times attributes to Maria's destruction. Most people were not killed by the hurricane itself; many died of secondary causes like impaired medical care due to lack of electric service.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.