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María’s Death Toll in Puerto Rico Is Being Underreported
By Omaya Sosa Pascual
30
September, 2017
SAN
JUAN, PUERTO RICO — Leovigildo Cotté died in the midst of
desperation over not getting the oxygen needed to keep him alive in
the only shelter that exists in the town of Lajas, which has been
without electricity since the passing of Hurricane María a week ago.
Not even his connections with the government saved him.
“The
generator never arrived,” said the current mayor of Lajas, Marcos
Turín Irizarry, who explained that he looked for oxygen for Cotté,
father of the former mayor of that same town, “turning every
stone,” but could not find it.
Cotté
is one of the unaccounted victims of the Category 5 hurricane that
devastated all of Puerto Rico last week, with its sustained winds and
gusts of up to 200 miles per hour. On Wednesday, the government of
Puerto Rico still held that the official number of deaths as a result
of the catastrophe was 16, but the Center for Investigative
Journalism (CPI, for its initials in Spanish) has confirmed that
there are dozens and could be hundreds in the final count.
The
fatalities related to circumstances created by the hurricane are
still mounting with each passing day, and official numbers are not
counting patients who are not receiving dialysis, oxygen and other
essential services, such as Pedro Fontánez, 79, who is bedridden at
the Pavía Hospital in Santurce and who the institution is attempting
to release since Saturday, while he lacks electricity at home to
support the oxygen and gastric tube-feeding he needs to continue
living. His daughter, Nilka Fontánez, showed up desperate at the
government’s Emergency Operations Center asking for help, but was
told they were not accepting patients there.
“There’s
no information,” she said, frustrated.
The
dead are at the hospital morgues, which are at capacity and in remote
places where the government has yet to go, and in many cases, their
families are unaware of the deaths. The Demographic Registry
certifies the deaths so bodies can be removed by funeral homes, many
of which are also not operating for a lack of resources and fuel.
They barely began certifying some of the dead on Monday, as Health
Secretary Rafael Rodríguez-Mercado confirmed in an interview.
Public
Safety Secretary Héctor Pesquera told the CPI that the names of the
dead due to the hurricane will not be revealed, as the lack of
communication has kept many people from knowing the whereabouts of
their families. Since the hurricane, many people have gone daily to
radio stations so that the on-air personalities can say the names of
family members with whom they have been unable to communicate in a
desperate attempt to find them.
A
week after María’s passage, the government of Puerto Rico is
trying with great difficulty to supply basic services, such as fuel,
roads and communications and tells the world every day of the
progress of these efforts through their press conferences at the
Emergency Operations Center (COE, for its initials in Spanish)
established in San Juan. But the fact that is not discussed is that
the number of deaths resulting from the disaster are much higher than
the 16 or 19 that have been offered as the official tally.
CPI
sources in half a dozen hospitals said those bodies are piling up at
the morgues of the 69 hospitals in Puerto Rico, of which 70% are not
operating. The majority of the hospital morgues that provided
information including the Medical Center in Bayamón and Santurce,
Pavía Hospital in Santurce, the Manatí Medical Center, Dr. Pila in
Ponce, the Río Piedras Medical Center, the Mayagüez Medical Center
and the HIMA hospitals in Caguas and Bayamón, are at full capacity.
Those hospitals are among the 18 that are partially operational.
Furthermore,
this media outlet learned that the Institute of Forensic Sciences is
also full of bodies and that allegedly 25 of those are hurricane
victims. On Tuesday, the IFS informed that it had increased its
storage capacity for bodies with a trailer that was obtained through
The Morgue federal program.
It’s
unclear what is happening with the deceased that are at the morgues
of the 51 hospitals that have had to close their doors, with which it
has been impossible to communicate.
Secretary
Rodríguez-Mercado acknowledged that hospital morgues are full,
including the one at the Medical Center in Mayagüez. He said the
accumulated bodies cannot be removed from the morgues by funeral
homes until the deaths can be certified by the Demographic Registry,
who barely began operating from regional emergency centers on Monday.
Furthermore,
the doctor acknowledged that the hurricane-related deaths are many
more than those officially documented so far. As he said Monday, the
three hospitals he visited that day in the island’s western region,
during the first contact he was able to achieve with that region, he
documented seven additional deaths “to the 19” that had been
revealed so far. That same afternoon, Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said the
official figure of hurricane-related deaths was still 16.
To
date, Rodríguez did not know the status of the situation at the
hospitals in Ponce, because the region remained completely cut off
from communications, but planned to go to that town on Tuesday to
explore the matter. On Wednesday, the CPI learned through Ponce Mayor
María “Mayita” Meléndez that the hospitals operating in that
town are San Cristóbal and San Lucas.
“We’re
finding dead people, people who have been buried. Related to the
hurricane (we have) 19 dead, which the governor reported, but
[people] have made common graves. We’ve been told people have
buried their family members because they’re in places that have yet
to be reached,” the Secretary told the CPI, while visibly shaken.
The
scenario is not optimistic. The hospitals that closed their doors
during the week that the emergency has lasted have more than 4,000
beds, and when asked what happened to those patients, where they were
transferred, the Secretary responded with a sincere “I don’t
know.”
Patients
Arriving in Critical Condition
CPI
sources said that in just two of the hospitals that are operating,
they were they able to document a dozen deaths among patients that
were transferred out of the closed-down hospitals. Furthermore, they
pointed out that the problem is that patients are arriving in
critical condition, with ventilators, for example, and with poorly
documented records regarding what had happened at the institution
where they were hospitalized. For that reason, and the limitation of
resources and fuel for power generators, the majority of hospitals
that are “operational” are not accepting transfers or new
patients, they said. The Río Piedras Medical Center, the
government’s main hospital for this disaster and the only tertiary
hospital in Puerto Rico, has been operating at half capacity.
Rodríguez-Mercado
said Wednesday that on that same day, they would meet with
specialized authorities from the U.S. Department of Health to discuss
the protocols used to handle cadavers to prevent a budding public
health problem. He said the current protocol for disposing bodies and
vegetative material in emergency situations is managed by the
Environmental Quality Board. But soon after, the president of that
agency, Tania Vázquez, said in an interview that her agency only
oversees the protocol related to disposing of animals, not human
beings, but added that burying a dead person without a certification
of the death is a crime. As of press time, the RRosselló’s press
secretary had not responded to a petition to clear up who is
responsible for the protocol for these emergency burials.
Meanwhile,
the dead continue to accumulate as a result of the chaos in the
health system due to a lack of diesel and the absence of a
communications plan between the system’s components, and these must
be added to those who are in areas that still lack communication and
those in remote areas.
“We’re
fighting. I would love for the government to understand that it has
to open dialysis centers. If they don’t receive the service, the
patients’ health is compromised quickly and they die. And yes, they
have died,” Armando Rodríguez, vice president of Grupo HIMA
confessed when confirming that the morgues of his two hospitals in
Bayamón and Caguas is above capacity.
Meanwhile,
thousands of doctors and nurses are literally at home unable to work,
said Dr. Joaquín Vargas, president of the Puerto Rico Primary
Physicians Groups Association, who was at the COE to see if the
government would set up an operations center where they could at
least answer calls from citizens.
The CPI also learned that a large portion of specialized physicians is unable to work because hospitals don’t have supplies and the ability to conduct their procedures, nor basic resources such as fuel or electricity to run their medical practices.
Left:
Mayor of San Juan currently wading through waist deep water using a
bullhorn to rescue misplaced residents.
Right: Your fearless leader at a golf course in New Jersey tweeting this morning that she sucks as a leader.
After
first tour of Puerto Rico, top general calls damage ‘the worst he’s
ever seen’
Lt.
Gen. Jeffrey S. Buchanan, the Department of Defense's primary
military liaison with FEMA, toured the damage in Puerto Rico for the
first time Saturday on a helicopter ride from San Juan to Ceiba.
After landing at a hangar in Ceiba with no power, no internet and no
cellular service to join other Marines that had already been there
for days, Buchanan spoke with PBS NewsHour.
"Sometimes we don't know what's going to happen until the storm actually hits, and this is the worst I've ever seen," Buchanan said.
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