ARGH … I AM SO TIRED OF THIS:  I did a post on Wednesday announcing the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ newest report, which compares the federal government’s response to Hurricane Harvey in Texas and to its response Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.  The Hill has now published a short piece on the report.  In it, The Hill states that “Hurricane Harvey killed dozens of people, but Maria killed nearly 3000.”  This is utter baloney (and that’s the nicest word I can think of for it).

As I detail in my Commissioner Statement (which is part of the report), this is an elementary error:  Wildly different methods for counting deaths were used for the two hurricanes.  Both methods are useful, but when making comparisons, apples must be compared to apples and oranges to oranges.

When Maria’s deaths were measured using the “direct death” method, the count was 64, slightly less than Harvey’s 68 (using more or less the same method).  But Puerto Rico preferred to use the “excess death” method, which looks for higher than normal death rates over the course of the six-month period following a disaster, for its official count.  That method yielded a count of 2975 for Maria.  No such study was ever done for Harvey, so we don’t know what the comparable numbers would have been.  Alas, journalists don’t bother to read (or apparently even skim) the things they write about.  And God forbid that they should make an effort to look at the dissenting opinions contained in a report.  In this case, if the journalist had looked at my Statement, she would have been saved an error.