Hurricane Maria's True Toll on Puerto Rico

Guest: Alexis R. Santos-Lozada, PhD, Director of Graduate Studies in Applied Demography, Department of Sociology and Criminology, and Research Affiliate in the Population Research Institute (PRI), Penn State University When the Category 4 Hurricane Maria touched down on September 20th of last year, it caused extensive damage. Many on the island were without electricity for months. And yet, miraculously, the Puerto Rican government said only 64 people lost their lives in the storm. Then, in December, demographer Alexis Santos, of Penn State University, published a study estimating at least a thousand people died because of the storm. This week, a new estimate published in the New England Journal of Medicine by a team at Harvard places the death toll around 4,500. That would make Hurricane Maria the deadliest in US history, outpacing even Katrina, which killed 1,833 in 2005.