His death is one of the clearest signs yet of the human toll taken by a slow and troubled relief effort since the typhoon swept ashore on Nov. 8. Like much-needed water and food, medicine — including antibiotics — was held up for days as rescue teams struggled to operate amid the chaos of a city with too few military or police officers to provide security and too little government control.

Aid workers huddled for days at the airport, unable to obtain vehicles or fuel and fearful of venturing out amid reports of sporadic gunfire as desperate people nearly hijacked one convoy approaching Tacloban, which turned back. Some of those workers have since said the inadequate government response has made this disaster more difficult in some ways than such historic catastrophes as the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004.

By Friday, a full week into the disaster, aid had finally begun to flow more smoothly, in part because of help from better-equipped foreign militaries. Field hospitals had begun to be set up, but as with the Indian Ocean disaster, aid workers worried that infections from lacerations would claim many more lives.

For Mr. Pulga’s family, the loss is catastrophic. A farmer, Mr. Pulga was one of the few men in his extended family able to earn money. In his final days, as he spoke with a reporter from The New York Times, it was that thought that consumed him.

On Friday, his widow, Jennifer, wept next to his covered corpse in a hallway at St. Paul’s Hospital here, a private hospital the surgeons transferred him to in the last-ditch effort to save him.