DALLAS — Texas officials have attributed dozens more deaths to February’s winter storm, raising the state’s death toll to 210.
The Department of State Health Services added 59 storm-related fatalities to its totals Tuesday, in its first update of the data since late April. In Dallas County, the toll increased from 11 to 20, and in Tarrant County it rose from three to nine.
The toll from the winter storm — which knocked out power, water and heat to millions of Texans — is more than double the 103 deaths caused by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Thirty-eight of the reported storm deaths occurred in North Texas: 20 in Dallas County, nine in Tarrant County, two each in Collin and Ellis counties, and one each in Grayson, Hunt, Kaufman, Lamar and Parker counties.
About one-fifth of the state’s deaths — 43 — occurred in Harris County. Twenty-eight more were in Travis County.
The deaths occurred from Feb. 11 to March 5, and most of them were the result of hypothermia, according to State Health Services. Other causes included carbon-monoxide poisoning, exacerbation of chronic illness, falls, fire and traffic accidents.
The state said its disaster epidemiologists are continuing to reconcile causes of death, meaning the toll could grow further.
There are three main ways the state health agency is notified of deaths related to disasters:
—Medical certifiers — doctors, medical examiners or, in some counties, justices of the peace — submit a form to the state that specifies a death was disaster-related.
—Medical certifiers flag a death record as being disaster-related.
—State epidemiologists match news reports of disaster-related deaths to death certificates.
Determining an exact number of deaths caused by the storm is a lengthy process, and in some cases it may remain impossible to know whether deaths were storm-related.
“We’ll probably never have a really accurate number,” Jeffrey Barnard, Dallas County’s chief medical examiner, has said.
———
