THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Since Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico, the official death toll according to the ineffective, bumbling Trump administration is 62. According to the Demographic Registry of Puerto Rico the number of dead was 1,062 above the normal numbers for the same period. And the final numbers for October have not yet been tallied.

A review by The New York Times of daily mortality data from Puerto Rico’s vital statistics bureau indicates a significantly higher death toll after Hurricane Maria than the government there has acknowledged.

The death toll continued to climb for weeks after the storm struck as the recovery dragged on. Hospitals struggled to keep clinics open. And officials still have not restored power across the island in the more than two months after Maria made landfall.

The Times’s analysis found that in the 42 days since Hurricane Maria made landfall on Sept. 20 as a Category 4 storm, 1,052 more people than usual died across the island. The analysis compared the number of deaths for each day in 2017 with the average of the number of deaths for the same days in 2015 and 2016.

Officially, just 62 people died as a result of the storm that ravaged the island with nearly 150-mile-an-hour winds, cutting off power to 3.4 million Puerto Ricans. The last four fatalities were added to the death toll on Dec. 2.

“Before the hurricane, I had an average of 82 deaths daily. That changes from Sept. 20 to 30th. Now I have an average of 118 deaths daily,” Wanda Llovet, the director of the Demographic Registry in Puerto Rico, said in a mid-November interview. Since then, she said on Thursday, both figures have increased by one.

Data for October are not yet complete, and the number of deaths recorded in that month is expected to rise. Record-keeping has been delayed because Puerto Rico’s power grid is operating at less than 70 percent of its capacity and swaths of the island still do not have power.

The Times estimates that in the three weeks after the storm, the toll was 739 deaths. If all those additional deaths were to be counted as related to the hurricane, it would make Maria the sixth deadliest hurricane since 1851.

The method used to count official storm deaths varies by state and locality. In some parts of the United States, medical examiners include only direct deaths, such as those caused by drowning in floodwaters. In Puerto Rico, however, Mr. Pesquera said, the medical examiner includes deaths caused indirectly by storms, such as suicides. That is why the gap between the official death toll and the hundreds of additional deaths is so striking.

A study, which has not been peer-reviewed, by a Pennsylvania State University professor and an independent researcher estimated that the death toll could be 10 times higher than the government’s official count.

The Center for Investigative Journalism reported on Thursday that another estimate, from the Center for Puerto Rican Studies of The City University of New York, found that 1,065 more people than usual died in the months of September and October.

Many of the deaths are not directly related to the storm, as in having your house collapse on you, but the lack of electricity and access after the storm had a profound negative effect on people like diabetics who could not keep their insulin safe or get more when their supply was used up.