Massachusetts is now tracking how many people died due to heat

After days of forecasters warning of dangerous heat, Massachusetts will be identifying and evaluating if anyone died due to the heat.

Previously Massachusetts was among states that did not track heat-related deaths where exposure to extreme heat was a secondary factor.

“States like Massachusetts don’t track heat deaths because they don’t have to and because no one has really fought for them to do it,” Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University who studies how cities respond to climate change, told WBUR in 2023. “And the reason is that historically we’ve largely failed to recognize how dangerous the heat can be.”

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