Lawsuit seeks to compel release of Puerto Rico's hurricane death data

View of displayed shoes in memory of those killed by Hurricane Maria in front of the Puerto Rican Capitol, in San Juan, on June 1, 2018. -
(Image credit: Ricardo Arduengo/Getty Images)

The Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics (PRIS) on Friday filed suit to compel the territory's health department and demographic registry to make data on deaths in Puerto Rico publicly accessible on a daily basis.

PRIS is an independent government agency, and it originally requested "reliable, comparable, and accessible" mortality data from the other two agencies in April, arguing that "there is considerable public interest in knowing with certainty the number of deaths that occurred due to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, in a manner that is comparable to other similar disasters, for which it is necessary to conduct a case-level epidemiological study."

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Bonnie Kristian

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.