A 2019 report by Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs, claimed that a 31% rise in the number of deaths between 2017 and 2018 was due to the sanctions imposed on Venezuela in 2017, and that 40,000 people in Venezuela may have died as a result. The report states: "The sanctions are depriving Venezuelans of lifesaving medicines, medical equipment, food, and other essential imports." Weisbrot stated that he "could not prove those excess deaths were the result of sanctions, but said the increase ran parallel to the imposition of the measures and an attendant fall in oil production". A US State Department spokesperson said that, "as the writers themselves concede, the report is based on speculation and conjecture" and "the economic situation in Venezuela has been deteriorating for decades, as Venezuelans themselves will confirm, thanks to Maduro's ineptitude and economic mismanagement." Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann, Juan Guaidó's representative to the Inter-American Development Bank, said that the analysis was flawed because it made invalid assumptions about Venezuela based on a different country, Colombia, and that "taking what happened in Colombia since 2017 as a counterfactual for what would have happened in Venezuela if there had been no financial sanctions makes no sense". Calling it "sloppy reasoning", Haussman and Frank Muci, state that the analysis failed to rule out other explanations, and failed to correctly account for PDVSA finances.