Yahoo News ‘3,000 people did not die’: Donald Trump rejects Puerto Rico death toll from Hurricane Maria
Donald Trump has caused uproar by rejecting the widely accepted death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria.
The US president claimed – without citing evidence – that ‘3,000 people did not die’ in the devastating hurricane in September 2017.
Trump called the death toll a move by Democrats to make him look bad.
3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2018
…..This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2018
He tweeted on Thursday as Hurricane Florence bears down on the Carolinas.
Trump said: ‘When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths.
‘As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000…’
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Puerto Rico’s governor raised the US territory’s official death toll from Hurricane Maria from 64 to 2,975 after an independent study found the number of people who died in the aftermath had been severely under-counted.
Maria devastated the island in September 2017 and knocked out the entire electricity grid.
Researchers from the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University said the original estimates were so low because doctors on the island had not been trained to properly classify deaths after a natural disaster.
The elderly and impoverished were hardest hit by the hurricane.
