"Puerto Rico survived the Hurricanes, now a financial crisis looms largely of their own making." says Sharyl Attkisson. A total lack of.....— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 12, 2017
...accountability say the Governor. Electric and all infrastructure was disaster before hurricanes. Congress to decide how much to spend....— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 12, 2017
Jesus Christ! What a heartless POS!...We cannot keep FEMA, the Military & the First Responders, who have been amazing (under the most difficult circumstances) in P.R. forever!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 12, 2017
The people of Puerto Rico are still in desperate need of help as this report by Vox clearly illustrates:
Lives surely have been saved in the response. But images and reports from the ground tell a story of people, cut off from basic supplies and health care, dying. They tell of hospitals running out of medication and fuel for their generators and struggling to keep up with the “avalanche of patients that came after the hurricane,” as one journalist put it.
The death toll from the hurricane is now up to 45, according to Gov. Ricardo Rosselló. But 90 percent of the 3.4 million American citizens on the island still don’t have power, and 35 percent still don’t have water to drink or bathe in. And given how deadly power outages can be, 45 deaths seems low, according to disaster experts.
Vox found the official death toll to be a little suspicious, so they did a deeper dive:
We searched Google News for reports of deaths in English and Spanish media from Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria. We found reports of a total of 81 deaths linked directly or indirectly to the hurricane. Of those, 45 were the deaths certified by the government. The remaining 36 deaths were confirmed by local public officials or funeral directors, according to the reports. We also found another 450 reported deaths, most of causes still unknown, and reports of at least 69 people still missing.
The broader issue here relates to how storm deaths are counted. There are clear deaths from the storm, clear deaths indirectly from the storm, and then deaths that are harder to determine — for instance, a sick patient who died in a hospital experiencing frequent power outages. And then there’s the issue of how effective authorities are at finding and investigating the deaths to make sure they’re included in the count. The breakdown of these categories suggests that the government is being much more cautious in designating deaths as directly or indirectly hurricane-related, given the public information available.
As Rachel Maddow pointed out on her show last night, a number of these fatalities were NOT the result of the initial hurricane, but the occurred in the aftermath because of a lack of food, water, or medical care.
And the death toll will only climb even higher if Trump pulls the relief effort.
But hey, why would he care?
After all these are only mostly brown people who cannot even vote in a presidential election.
Source http://ift.tt/2g52Fqy
