Haiti Death Toll Might Have Been Inflated, Study Says

The real number of deaths in last year’s earthquake in Haiti may be less than what the government estimated, a U.S.-based agency said in a study on Tuesday.

The Haitian government and the United Nations said that more than 220,000 people were killed in the quake, but the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) said that no more than 85,000 were killed in the quake.

The unpublished report, which was obtained by The Wall Street Journal, essentially questions the worthiness of the billions of dollars that was donated and given to the beleaguered nation.

The study is based on samples taken from hard-hit areas in Port-au-Prince, and the survey had questions for residents regarding how many people lived there before and after the quake.

The study also estimated that the quake made nearly 900,000 people homeless rather than the Haitian government’s estimates of 1.5 million, according to the Journal. It also claimed that between 141,000 and 375,000 people live in tent cities rather than the estimated 680,000.

Timothy Schwartz, who did some of the work for USAID, said in a blog post on Salon that “it seems pretty clear that no one, not the government nor anyone else, had any idea how many people were killed.”

“But the interesting thing is, that while I am not impugning any motivations, almost everyone who had anything to do with any type of official agency or NGO seemed deliberately bent on skewing the numbers as high as they possibly could. And they did so with total disregard for the evidence,” he added.

The Associated Press reported that the study at this stage has some inconsistencies and won’t be released publicly until they are changed.

U.S. State Department spokesperson Preeti Shah told AP, “The first draft of the report contained internal inconsistencies with its own findings” and that they “are reviewing these inconsistencies … to ensure information we release is accurate.”