Hurricane Helene Deaths Won't Stop for 15 Years

Hurricane Helene's death toll has been rising for a week. It won't fully stop for 15 years, or so suggests a study published Wednesday in Nature. The New York Times describes the findings as so staggering to the researchers that they spent years checking their math. What they found in their survey of 501 hurricanes and tropical storms (collectively referred to as tropical cyclones, or TCs) that hit the continental US between 1930 and 2015: The average TC "indirectly accelerated the death of roughly 7,170–11,430 individuals, depending on model specification," per the study, which was conducted by Stanford global environmental policy professor Solomon Hsiang and Rachel Young, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley.

That tallies to more deaths than those resulting from "automobile crashes, infectious diseases, and combat for US soldiers" across that 85-year-period, per the Times. It also vastly outpaces "the average of 24 immediate deaths reported in government statistics," per the study. More findings:

• The excess mortality risk is greatest for infants less than 1 year of age, followed by those 65 and older.
• Due to age distribution, the 65+ group accounts for 46% of the excess deaths, followed by ages 45–64 (8%), 1–44 (32%), and infants.
• Some 99% of excess infant deaths take place more than 21 months after the TC, "indicating that the infants were not conceived prior to landfall," per the study. "This suggests that cascades of indirect effects following TCs, rather than personal direct exposure to the physical event, generate this mortality."
• The study also found Black people were more heavily impacted, partly due to their "spatial distribution, which is denser in the southeast where TCs are common."
• As for the official causes of death, 59% are classified as "other," a nonspecific category encompasses causes ranging from diabetes to suicide to sudden infant death syndrome. Cardiovascular disease is second at 36%, followed by cancer at 12%.
• "Infectious diseases, respiratory diseases and motor vehicle accidents are not linked to TCs," per the study. "Future work should investigate the role of specific causes within the 'other' causes category."

The researchers don't identify the drivers of the excess deaths, but they propose five hypotheses, among them that economic disruption spurs household economic decisions that negatively impact health (they give the example of job loss changing one's health insurance status or retirement savings being used to repair property damage rather than go to future healthcare needs).