Hospitals push for ongoing coverage in disaster-stricken Puerto Rico
To bring attention and federal aid to its devastated health system, administrators court media attention with human-interest pieces. Here are key elements of their life-and-death mission.
Making headlines in a disaster is easy; keeping public attention two weeks later is much harder.
In the wake of Hurricane Maria, some officials have pointed to the low death toll in Puerto Rico as grounds for celebration.
Yet the devastation goes far beyond those numbers, and hospital administrators and communicators are working to keep the stakes high and get federal aid expedited to the island.
It doesn’t help when the administration itself works to limit information about the island’s struggles:
As of Wednesday, half of Puerto Ricans had access to drinking water and 5 percent of the island had electricity, according to statistics published by the Federal Emergency Management Agency on its Web page documenting the federal response to Hurricane Maria.
By Thursday morning, both of those key metrics were no longer on the Web page.
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