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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Those deaths where not caused by 9/11, they where caused by people’s responces to 9/11. By that token the moon landing or any major event caused deaths by changing people’s behaviors, but saying the moon landing killed people seems more obviously wrong.

By comparison some people had heath issues directly caused by 9/11 and you could reasonably add those deaths to the 9/11 death toll.

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the 3000 number for maria comes from taking the total death rate in puerto rico in the 6(?) months following the hurricane and subtracting the average death rate for that period in previous years. it's an nonstandard way of calculating disaster fatalities, chosen specifically because it gives a big number that is useful for relief lobbying purposes (it's like 9/11!), and if you calculated 9/11 casualties the same way you would surely come up with a significantly higher number. the number of people killed directly by the hurricane, during the course of the hurricane, was under 100.

I thought they ended up doing that because the bodies were piling up uncounted and the governor admitted that that the civilian infrastructure required to keep track of the dead had itself failed and so asked for outside help from academics on the mainland. They didn't go with the highest academic figure either.

If they were actually trying for high figures, as you suggest, why not go with the Harvard study placing it at around 4600 dead?

But why not include "people's responses" as a direct consequence of the attack itself?

Terrorists blow up a target and "people's responses" are going to be an attempt to flee the damage. Some of them will be hurt or killed doing so. Is that not ascribable to the terrorist attack itself? It seems arbitrary to exclude that.

e.g. if someone in the period before a hurricane decides not to evacuate and that person dies, we still ascribe their death to the hurricane.

The fact that people decide to rely on other, historically less safe, modes of transportation after an attack on airliners is somewhat predictable. Can we really write that additional risk off as "people's responses" and not part of the intention of the attack?

A coworker was sitting at a large conference table when a giant wall of jet fuel came through the ceiling killing half the people in the room. Fleeing the building due to fire is a response to someone hitting the building with an airplane.

Someone not flying six months later because of something they saw on TV is filtered through a long chain of other people. It’s hardly the saw thing.

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