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More or Less: Behind the Stats

WS More or Less: Trump and the Puerto Rico Death Toll

More or Less: Behind the Stats

BBC

Business, Mathematics, Science, News Commentary, News

4.63.5K Ratings

🗓️ 24 September 2018

⏱️ 10 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How can we calculate excess mortality after a natural disaster?

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

0:04.6

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

0:08.4

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable

0:14.3

experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC

0:20.4

makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

0:24.6

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

0:29.7

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.

0:37.0

Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service.

0:41.0

We're your weekly guide to the numbers all around us and I'm Tim

0:44.2

Hartford. A year ago on the 20th of September 2017, Harakan Maria hit Puerto Rico.

0:53.8

It was the second hurricane that month to arrive on the island, which is the territory

0:58.7

of the United States, meaning that the people living there are US citizens.

1:03.0

With winds that reached sustained speeds of 175 miles an hour,

1:07.5

Maria reached devastation across the island.

1:10.5

Nearly two weeks later, President Donald Trump visited and compared the devastation

1:15.0

to that reeked by Hurricane Katrina on the US in 2005.

1:20.0

I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you've thrown our budget a little out of whack because we've spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico and that's fine.

1:28.0

We've saved a lot of lives. If you look at the, every death is a horror, but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds of people that died.

1:44.0

And you look at what happened here with really a storm that was

1:48.0

just totally overpowering. Nobody's ever seen anything like this.

1:52.0

Now what is your death count as of this moment?

1:55.0

17?

...

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