Thread by @JewhadiTM

You are all buffoons- ignorant about the true death toll resulting directly from Maria AND about the 25th Amendment.

Media Reports About The Death Toll In Puerto Rico Are Needlessly Confusing fivethirtyeight.com/features/media…

https://twitter.com/timmybicicleta/status/1040233131586990080

4,645. “Hurricane Maria Killed 4,645 in Puerto Rico, 70 Times Official Toll,” Democracy Now reported. “Harvard study: Hurricane Maria death toll exceeds 4,000” NBC News wrote.

CNN led its report with something similar: “An estimated 4,645 people died in Hurricane Maria and its aftermath in Puerto Rico, according to an academic report published Tuesday in a prestigious medical journal.”

But that number is not a count of the death toll in Puerto Rico caused by Hurricane Maria. Instead, it’s just the midpoint of a wide-ranging estimate of the possible number of deaths; the full range goes from 793 to 8,498 people.

What that estimate means — that if you randomly sampled households over and over, 95 percent of the ranges extrapolated from those surveys would include the actual death count — doesn’t easily lend itself to headlines.

And in focusing on that single number, news stories often overlooked much of the qualitative information about how people died.

Here’s how the Harvard study worked: In January and February of 2018, researchers surveyed more than 3,000 randomly selected households across Puerto Rico and asked residents how many people from those households had died in the months after the storm made landfall.

They found 38 deaths 1 in those 3,300 households, and they used that figure to calculate a mortality rate, which was compared to the mortality rate from the same time the previous year, before the storm hit.

The difference was then used to come up with a very broad estimate for the number of people who died above what you’d expect to see in a normal year.

The authors of the Harvard study are well aware of its limitations, which is why they didn’t include the 4,645 figure in the headline of their press release, and also why they made sure that the range of estimates was front and center in all communication.

But the true number? That’s not something that could come from the Harvard research, said Irizarry. The house-to-house survey only allows for a broad range of estimated deaths.

It does suggest that deaths remained high for months after the storm, after the time period covered by previous media outlets and researchers.

There is no national standard for how to count disaster-related deaths. While the National Hurricane Center reports only direct deaths -those caused by flying debris or drowning, some local govts may include indirect deaths from such things as heart attacks and house fires.

““Indirect deaths” may be associated with any unsafe or unhealthy conditions BEFORE, during, and after the natural disaster.”

(Which is an inflation of the true count. )

Furthermore: It’s not a federal responsibility to upkeep the infrastructure. Actually most of the infrastructure ... is owned by the private sector.”

Puerto Rico was a disaster long before Maria ravaged the island thehill.com/opinion/energy…

“Puerto Rico was a catastrophe of corruption, mismanagement, incompetence and ignorance long before the added misery wrought by Hurricane Maria, which exposed to the world what was there to be seen all along: an island ill-prepared for a sunny day, much less a stormy one.”

“For at least a decade, the media has been sounding the alarm about the crumbling infrastructure and financial mismanagement of Puerto Rico.”

“But it all fell on deaf ears. Let's flashback to August 2014, when Reuters reporter Luciana Lopez showed that Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority was teetering on insolvency.”

“The power company relied too heavily on expensive oil and was plagued by aging infrastructure dating back to the 1960s, a bloated workforce, and a billing system that was arbitrary and difficult to justify.”

“As a result of the failing infrastructure, rolling blackouts, high unemployment and fleeing manufacturing, people were fleeing Puerto Rico prior to 2014, when the island faced $72 billion in debt. Puerto Rico has lost more than 200,000 citizens since 2000.”

“That works out to about $20,000 dollars for every man, woman and child on the island, where the median income at that time was about $20,000.”

“Puerto Rico's roads, bridges, dams, ports, hospitals, water treatment plants and more have been decaying for years. And it has only gotten worse. In August 2015, CNBC again warned of the dangers to the citizens of Puerto Rico of inferior and dangerous critical infrastructure.”

“Fred Imbert reported that the real problem facing the people of Puerto Rico is the lack of maintenance of infrastructure.”

“In May 2016, just more than a year before Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, the Atlantic published an article alleging that even without damages caused by hurricanes or storms Puerto Rico was heading for crisis with a huge human toll of man-made causes.”

“Reporter Vann Newkirk cited the electric grid on the brink of collapse and schools with dangerous wiring and unstable construction.”

“He also wrote about the island's public health and its inferior healthcare facilities, noting that San Juan's Centro Medico Hospital had to delay payments on debt to provide basic healthcare to patients. The medical director was quoted as saying, "We are hanging by a thread."

“It is important to understand that Puerto Rico was destined for humanitarian crisis and was in crisis long before Hurricane Maria. It was only a matter of time before it became evident to the mainland of the United States and the world.”

“The Obama administration had years, but it let Puerto Rico slip into decay and put the people residing there at grave risk.”

“Now, people are pointing fingers at the Trump administration that somehow the president is to blame for the harm that has come to Puerto Rico, when it is really years of neglect and incompetence by the federal government as well as local officials.”

“We as a nation must make every effort to provide all the help we can muster to provide the necessary support to the people of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.”

“But we must also manage expectations and not blame the current administration for the gross incompetence of others who created the crisis the people now face. This remediation will take a decade or more and cost tens of billions of dollars.”

How Puerto Rico's Debt Created A Perfect Storm Before The Storm n.pr/2HBjkSZ

“Before Hurricane Maria hit last September, Puerto Rico was battered by the forces of another storm — a financial storm.

The island's own govt borrowed billions of $ to pay its bills, a practice that Puerto Rico's current gov, Ricardo Rosselló, now calls "a big Ponzi scheme."

But it didn't fall into financial ruin all on its own: Wall Street kept pushing the Puerto Rican government's loans even as the island teetered on default, with a zeal that bank insiders are now describing with words like "unethical" and "immoral."

“"There are elements that have not been replaced in years," said José Sánchez, then the head of power grid restoration for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. "Puerto Rico is in dire need, not only of power plants but a reconstruction of the grid itself."

And it wasn't just the power grid. Water pumping stations, bridges, levees, roads — all had been starved for investment for years. Even people's homes weren't as strong as they should have been.

Before the storm, the island could afford only FIVE building code inspectors, for a population of 3.5 MILLION people.

TRUMP: “Texas & Florida are doing great but Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure & massive debt, is in deep trouble. It’s old electrical grid, which was in terrible shape, was devastated.”

TRUMP: “Much of the Island was destroyed, with billions of dollars owed to Wall Street and the banks, which, sadly, must be dealt with.”

“Simply put, it won’t be possible to reconstruct Puerto Rico’s infrastructure, economy, or society without reconstructing its finances. If that’s what Trump was going for, it’s dead-on.”

FACT CHECK: Trump is Right, The Media's 3,000 Puerto Rico Death Toll is Inflated frontpagemag.com/point/271320/f…