Extreme Weather Events Raise Death Rates for Weeks
Emergency room visits and deaths can be heightened for weeks after a major extreme weather event, according to a new study
Evacuation from Bellevue Hospital October 31, 2012 in New York City. The hospital had been operating on backup generators since losing power during Hurricane Sandy but had to be evacuated once the extent of the damage became clear.
Allison Joyce/Getty Images
CLIMATEWIRE | Emergency room visits and deaths can be heightened for weeks after a major extreme weather event, according to a new study from researchers at two Massachusetts hospitals that highlights gaps in federal tracking for billion-dollar disasters.
The study, published Thursday in Nature Medicine, looked at weather events between 2011 and 2016 that caused more than $1 billion in damages and compared them with data from Medicare. They found that one week after major weather events, emergency department visits and mortality remained elevated by more than 1 percent from pre-disaster levels, and deaths remained elevated for as much as six weeks after the event.
“These findings suggest that the biggest weather disasters have broad and long-lasting impacts on health emergencies and deaths among those who have Medicare,” said lead author Renee Salas, an emergency room physician at Massachusetts General Hospital.
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Salas and her co-authors see their study as a jumping-off point for further research — particularly to help fill gaps in the ways the federal government quantifies the toll of disaster.
The authors collected information about billion-dollar disasters from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. It reports the…
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