Puerto Rico officials originally set the hurricane's death toll at 64, but a more recent assessment of the data yielded an estimate closer to 3,000.!
Link to the report:
https://publichealth.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/downloads/projects/PRstudy/Acertainment%20of%20the%20Estimated%20Excess%20Mortality%20from%20Hurricane%20Maria%20in%20Puerto%20Rico.pdf
The original count had languished under a cloud of skepticism ever since it was announced by Puerto Rico’s Department of Public Safety in December 2017. The Category 4 hurricane was the worst natural disaster ever to strike the United States territory and the third costliest storm on record, having caused an estimated $90 billion in damage. Even before government officials locked the Hurricane Maria death toll in at 64, statistics-based estimates by a number of different sources indicated that the actual total could top 1,000.
The GWU study, conducted in collaboration with researchers from the University of Puerto Rico Graduate School of Public Health, was commissioned by Governor Ricardo Rosselló in February 2018 in response to widespread criticism of the earlier estimate. GWU’s results differ from those of a July 2018 study by Harvard University which concluded, based on survey data with a wide margin of uncertainty, that as many as 4,645 Puerto Ricans died as a result of the hurricane over a two-and-a-half month period. The newer findings relied on government mortality data and death certificates, which the researchers say afford a more accurate accounting of the death toll than survey data.