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House Bill Improving Natural Disaster Casualty Count Passes

Lawmakers have passed a bill setting standards for tallying death tolls in natural disasters. The Huffington Post reports the bill was introduced by Representative Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.) The Count Victims Act would begin a 2 year study of the best ways to count mortality. It would direct FEMA and the National Academy of Medicine to conduct the study. This aims to prevent the type of inaccuracies that followed Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Last year, Puerto Rico suffered tremendous devastation. Following which, the government presented a woefully inaccurate mortality count. The official death toll stood at 64 for nearly a year before a commission investigated. Following their report, Governor Ricardo Rosselló raised the toll from 64 to 2,975. “We... watched as Donald Trump pointed to the artificially low death toll as evidence that his Administration was responding appropriately, when, in reality, a humanitarian catastrophe was befalling our fellow American citizens.” Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.) Trump denied the results, accusing Democrats of making them up. FEMA administrator Brock Long, a Trump appointee, backed the president’s disavowal. Long claimed the agency “doesn’t count deaths.”