Posted on 09/19/2018 9:18:04 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Hurricane Sandy was the deadliest hurricane to hit the East Coast since the 70s. It had the most direct fatalities, with 49 drownings in homes and cars, and 20 deaths caused by falling trees out of the 72 direct deaths that occurred in the United States.
When it comes to direct deaths, Hurricane Sandy was far deadlier than Hurricane Maria’s impact on Puerto Rico. But Sandy took place under Obama and Maria under Trump. Just as with Hurricane Katrina, under Bush, the media was motivated to make the disaster appear much worse than it really was. And it did that by running figures from studies calculating the possible indirect death toll from Maria.
That is why the media has been aggressively pushing a George Washington University study claiming a 2,975 death toll for Maria in Puerto Rico, after earlier pushing a Harvard study claiming that 4,645 Puerto Ricans had died due to the storm. That one had a margin of error of “plus or minus 3,852.”
When most of your death toll is a potential margin of error, there’s no reason to take your numbers seriously. The GWU study, the one that Trump questioned, groups in deaths in February 2018 and attributes it to a storm that struck Puerto Rico in September 2017. Skepticism is warranted.
The 2,975 number attributes 800 deaths between December and February to Hurricane Maria.
The studies are not facts. Treating them as facts shows a basic ignorance of science. Contending, as CNN, and the New York Times have, that Trump’s description of them as inflated is “false”, is itself false.
When your hurricane death toll includes people who died a third of a year later, it's inflated.
The studies of Puerto Rico create massively inflated death tolls by guesstimating the population, comparing the death rates during and long after the hurricane to average death rates, and attributing the excess to the storm. The process relies heavily on guesswork. Despite that the media has taken to treating those numbers as a fact, even “fact checking” President Trump for questioning them.
But if we are to treat such estimated death tolls as definitive, what of Hurricane Sandy?
The Federal response to Hurricane Sandy was badly mismanaged. I saw that up close at the time as a New Yorker. Nevertheless the media exploited the disaster to boost Obama’s election prospects. Obama toured the disaster zone, made promises to the survivors that were never kept, and moved on.
But what of the actual death toll?
A Rutgers study found a 31% increase in mortality from heart attacks in the Sandy impact zone in New Jersey. That study found 69 extra deaths caused by heart attacks due to Sandy in the first two weeks and that total deaths rose from 1069 in the high-impact areas in the two weeks before impact to 1287 in the two weeks afterward.
A difference of 218 deaths.
Since New Jersey only had 29.1% of the confirmed Sandy deaths, such a picture is very incomplete. But we can assume that the study would only account for less than a third of the Sandy death toll.
Another study did estimate a potentially larger Sandy death toll by looking at fluctuations in New Jersey deaths. Unlike the GWU and Harvard studies, and some of the earlier Katrina studies, it received little attention outside medical circles because its implications were politically unwelcome. The mainstream media appears to have never mentioned it, despite giving front page coverage to the Maria studies.
The Sandy study was confined to New Jersey, which had the second largest number of deaths. It’s not nearly as comprehensive as the Maria studies claim to be. But, like the Maria studies, it found a significantly elevated number of deaths among the elderly and ill populations in New Jersey.
The study found that in the month that Hurricane Sandy struck, from October 28, 2012 through November 27, 2012 and in the quarter, October 28, 2012 through January 27, 2013, deaths rose by 6% for the month and 7% for the quarter.
During the quarter, deaths due to infectious respiratory diseases went up 20% and from non-infectious respiratory diseases by 24%. Deaths due to unintentional injuries rose by 23% for the month and 10% for the quarter. Cardiovascular deaths went up 6% in the month and quarter.
Deaths for people over 76 years old rose 10% in the month and 13% for the quarter. Deaths among the elderly caused by unintentional injury went up 33% for the month and 26% for the quarter.
Back of the envelope calculation would suggest that this could add between 12,000 to 20,000 fatalities when you consider that New Jersey accounted for only a third of the deaths in Hurricane Sandy.
Does this mean that Hurricane Sandy killed 20,000 people? About as likely that Maria killed 3,000.
But if the media is going to use studies and estimates of possible indirect deaths that stretch out for many months after the hurricane, then it ought to apply the same rules to Sandy as it does to Maria.
If the media demands that Trump accept a 3,000 death toll in Puerto Rico, it better brace itself for a vastly expanded Sandy death toll. And to have that death toll blamed on the Obama administration.
Fair is fair. And unfair is unfair.
The Democrats and the media have decided to use flawed studies that assume higher death rates, especially among the elderly, based on population guesstimates, to vastly expand hurricane death tolls for political purposes. But they’ve forgotten that Sandy was far deadlier than Maria.
And they’ve also forgotten that the Obama administration badly mishandled its response.
I know, because I was there.
While Obama, Chris Christie and Michael Bloomberg badly mismanaged the hurricane response, Donald J. Trump, then still a private citizen, opened Trump Hotel & Tower to hurricane refugees.
Obama meanwhile flew in, got a photo op with a grieving woman that made all the papers, and then when she asked for the help that had been promised her, got a form letter from the White House.
Pete Souza, Obama’s court photog, recently reposted his version of Stalin’s Engelsina Markizova photo on social media to bash Trump. Like Engelsina, the fate of the real woman in the propaganda shot was forgotten.
Did Obama’s incompetence kill 20,000 people?
Local governments are responsible for responding to natural disasters. New York City, like Puerto Rico, had a deeply dysfunctional local government that could barely figure out how to boil water. Manhattan lost power because one of its major power plants was sitting right on the water. Puerto Rico’s setup was even more dysfunctional. Neither of those were the fault of the Federal government.
FEMA usually mishandles every natural disaster. Politicians usually fly in for the photo ops. The gargantuan aid bill inevitably dumps most of the money into assorted pork for the politically connected.
Statistical spikes are suggestive, but not certain. The elderly and people with serious medical problems are the most likely to be affected by power outages, hospital shutdowns and other problems caused by natural disasters. But they’re also the most at risk even without the occurrence of a natural disaster.
The media is selling a lie. And it knows that it’s selling a lie.
Its fake outrage over the inflated Puerto Rico death toll is the very definition of fake news.
When a Republican is in the White House, the media inflates the death toll and blasts the response. When a Democrat is in the White House, the media minimizes the death toll and praises the response.
The media’s attacks on President Trump over Puerto Rico aren’t journalism, they’re messaging.
But while the media is entitled to its own biases, it isn’t entitled to its own standards. If it wants to use the expanded numbers for Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, it’s going to have to use them for Sandy too.
If it wants to blame Trump for 3,000 dead, Obama is going to be blamed for 20,000 dead.
Thanks for posting this article!
The same argument would apply for Florence, “barely above a tropical storm” and then only for a few hours. However there as in the Carolinas, high water is a very major factor as it was in Houston. PR on the other hand had very strong Cat. 4 and 3 winds.
Actually if the Democrats were smart they would use these elevated death statistics from Sandy to show how dangerous “global warming” is becoming and also collect them for Houston and the Carolinas. It appears that extreme rain conditions are definitely on the rise, whether from rising CO2, minimal sunspots, or other causes, to be determined. Is it wise for the Trump administration to weaken building standards in flood zones so that our insurance rates keep rising as houses built and often flood insured keep being destroyed and paid for by our taxes or insurance companies?
A big problem with the PR statistics is that so far there is no indication of exact causes of death after the immediate storm: loss of Insulin (how many weeks without refrigeration or supplies, presumably worse than NJ, TX, or NC and SC), heart attack or inability to get heart medication (for how many weeks in each place), death from initial injuries or subsequent accidents for failure of medical supplies (how many weeks in each place), etc. etc.
I saw a recent report that another problem is that there has been a shift in the Jet Stream patterns which is contributing to the severity of these storms and rainfall. What is causing that? Do you know what percentage of power was lost because of the Manhattan power plant you mentioned. I thought a lot of power came from the Con Ed plant which is well up the Hudson on high ground near the NJ north border.
Regarding people staying to help. A lot of those who went were children and presumably family members. My son stayed and it was 3 months before his children were back in private school. It is planned to close many of the public schools because so many are gone. Apparently these stupid lazy people DO care about their kids’ education. He has electrical training and has been very busy working there. He is also upset that Home Depot is not sending an extra ration of electrical supplies, but is apparently keeping to it’s pre-Maria schedules of resupply. How stupid is that!! His Puerto Rican wife is continuing her work in a health service business. So yes people have left, often for their kids’ welfare, but many have stayed, and mainland stores are not doing a good job of finding out what people really need to fix things or get back on their feet daily living wise, and then seeing that their PR branches get those things. Like, for example, “winter coats” for Burlington Coat Factory: how dumb is that!!
In 2006 I posted this piece to memorialize the 200 or so Latinos who were killed in the 9/11 World Trade Center destruction. I tried to enter this in search and it was not found. I hope that posting it like a comment will work better. Any other ideas on how to access my old post?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1698978/post (9/10/06)
I clicked it and was told this does not exist on this server.
Looks like you dropped the “s” in /posts
Here’s the working link:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1698978/posts
Sometimes using a search engine (I use Bing) is easier/more effective than FR search, especially if you remember title or article wording. I searched:
“freerepublic Latinos who were killed in the 9/11 World Trade Center”
Thank you for that “s”. The link from you works, and I have also corrected it in my “about” page. The translation to English was my own, and I have no idea where my notes from 2006 can be found.
Glad I could help -- most of the time I can barely find my own "s", much less someone else's. ;^).
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