Glenn Kessler:

But there’s a problem: This is not a verified number, unlike body counts in wars. The Harvard study offers only an estimate – a midpoint along a broad range of possibilities. It is not based on death records, only estimates of deaths from people who were interviewed in a survey.

In effect, the researchers took one number – 15 deaths identified from a survey of 3,299 households – and extrapolated that to come up with 4,645 deaths across the island. That number came with a very large caveat, clearly identified in the report, but few news media accounts bothered to explain the nuances.

Harvard’s estimated toll was “a 95% confidence interval of 793 to 8,498, and 4,645 falls in the middle of this range.”

Four other studies estimated the death toll between 605 and 1,194, but Harvard’s study was quite different compared to the earlier ones.

The quoted piece makes a good case that the actual death toll is closer to the earlier studies, and on the lower end of Harvard’s estimate interval.

That’s still a catastrophic loss of life from a disaster that doesn’t get enough attention.