Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

Changes in death rates directly relate to relative vaccination rates. Vaccination was initially rolled out to the elderly they where also more willing to get vaccinated. It’s strange to think that 75 year olds grew up in a time period where several horrific diseases disappeared due to vaccination efforts. It it’s clear they have a lot more faith in vaccination.

https://data.cdc.gov/Vaccinations/COVID-19-Vaccination-and-C...

Let's assume deaths for older people haven't changed so the increase is entirely among the younger group.

x: younger y: older

1.4x + y = 1350 x + y = 1319 0.4x = 31 x = 77.5 (younger 2020) 1.4x = 108.5 (younger 2021) y = 1241.5 (older 2020 and 20201)

So assuming no increase in non-COVID deaths in the older group, we have 77.5 deaths in 2020 and 108.5 deaths in 2021 in the younger demographic. The actual numbers would be even lower since there have obviously been deaths in the older population.

Unless I am embarrassingly wrong on the calculation, these figures don't make sense. The source says this 40% increase figure is based on his life insurance customers who are “primarily working-age people 18 to 64”. This being just among his policy holders could explain the tiny absolute figures in the younger group. But where are the numbers for the older group coming from? His statement doesn't exclude the possibility of policies for ages < 18 and > 64. But if that's a small fraction of their customer base, it would imply a huge death rate for the older policy holders.

These numbers seem very fishy. Even if his older members are dying at astronomical rates and his numbers are correct, this is about as far from a representative sample as you could get and cannot be extrapolated to the general population. And I assume that's what the source means when he says "the increase in deaths represents huge, huge numbers."

By the way, I am not implying that there hasn't been an increase in non-COVID deaths among the young and old in these last two years. We know that's the because there is actually real data on this that the article could have included.

Not sure how your first two sentences above aren't speculation. It's like you're preemptively attack all the other speculation as "wild".

There is uncertainty in many areas of life, but this seems like one thing we don’t have to speculate about. We will not only have definitive data [1] within a couple years, but also annual [2] and weekly [3] provisional data much sooner.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7014e1.htm

[3]: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Weekly-Provisional-Counts-of-Death...

Without knowing anything else, I seriously doubt that is statistically significant.

The normal pre-COVID ICU bed occupancy rate was somewhere near 57-82% (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840149/). 54% is quite low. I suspect that the bar for getting into an ICU bed has been raised by the number of COVID patients.

BTW, Indiana has ~1,940 ICU beds (https://www.wfyi.org/news/articles/indiana-releases-specific...). In numbers, that means

* ~173 are unoccupied,

* ~718 are occupied by COVID patients, and

* ~1048 are occupied by non-COVID patients.

~47 x 5,000 = 235k years of life (extra).

In the US in 2020 the average age of death from Covid was ~77 [1]. People ~77 are expected to life ~10.2 years [2]. In 2020, there were ~350k Covid deaths [3]. But (very crudely) 3.5M years of life lost.

This small group of 11,000 people (3%) made up 7% of years of life lost.

By 2021, the average age of Covid death was ~67 - so the average person was losing ~17 years of life [1]. This is because that extra ~5,000 deaths has so much weight.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wvpublic.org/health-science...

[2] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

[3] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7014e1.htm

I am confused why you are completely ignoring this statement and trying to claim the exact opposite.

> July, 2020: 16,000 dead

> But it's still a 45% increase, so that age group was the worst affected, in terms of the increase in death.

You can't draw that conclusion at all with, effectively, one data point while assuming the other is a baseline. You need to develop a proper statistical profile, determine the mean, variance/standard deviation, standard error and then try to understand the numbers to make inferences.

Where are you getting those numbers?

2019 - ages 25 - 44:

- represent ~320 deaths per 100k. [0]

- represent 85M pop. [1]

=> That's ~272k deaths per year in that age band.

You can check my math.

[0] (page 3) https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db395-H.pdf

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the...

Further, this chart shows covid deaths as a proportion of all cause mortality. [2]

For ages under 50, covid accounts for 1-5% of all deaths.

For ages over 50, covid accounts for 10-15% of all deaths.

[2] (caveat, this is a snapshot of Feb 17 2021 data) https://datavisualizations.heritage.org/public-health/covid-...

In no age band do we see a 45% increase in deaths due to covid.

The article does not say this. The substantial majority of Covid deaths occur among people close to or beyond the typical life expectancy [1]. It's hard to measure how many people would have died during this time frame due to complications other than Covid, and the NYT article you linked to did not claim that these are additional deaths beyond what "would have died had the epidemic not occurred."

1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

Why does the fact that it is larger than 3 standard deviations suggest to you that it must be an artifact? If the death rate is normally very stable then the standard deviation will be small, so it will be easy for any unusual increase to exceed that.

Remember the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 that was a major catastrophe around the world? According to a Google search it killed 227,898 people. Last I checked Covid had killed about 5.5 million, which is worse that every single war since WWII.

Of course, I think it's very fair to say the devastation from a war is much worse than Covid (a war destroys infrastructure and primarily kills the young), but from a pure "number of deaths" perspective I think most people have a huge difficulty comprehending the severity of the pandemic.

People reporting on deaths have to average over a period, otherwise you find deaths drop on weekends and spike on mondays because that's when the paperwork gets processed. In this case, they're averaging over an entire quarter.

I could well believe that the variance in death rates between Q4 2008 and Q4 2018 had a standard deviation of 3% - an entire quarter is a lot of averaging.

It's not an artifact, it's incorrect modeling. If they're talking about sigmas, then they're modeling deaths as being normally distributed. But deaths aren't normally distributed, as you can tell by glancing at a graph of deaths over time: there's way more probability mass in the extremes than you would expect from a normal distribution. This sort of thing (modelling something poorly, then getting all surprised when reality violates your model) is depressingly common.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/deat...

And it is indeed a very high rate.

The insurance guy was civilized enough not to complain that his company's incurring lots of losses -- getting hammered by writing lots of checks to survivors. But surely that's how an insurance company knows what's going on.

It makes no sense for an executive of a mutual insurance company to sling bs about this kind of loss. Because auditors.

I see it also in the school vandalism, increase in shooting deaths and general uncertainty about rule of law

1) Those in ill health likely can't afford life insurance.

2) Life insurance is mostly to provide for dependents--which means people in good enough shape to have dependents and people are young enough to still have dependents. (Once the kids are grown there's much less reason for term life insurance.)

Reduced capacity in the health service for stuff like cancer?

They’re not even talking about rescheduling the hernia surgery anytime soon - he’s making do with a compression band.

This is why it is other people’s business whether someone is vaccinated.

I still think this needs further analysis. Perhaps the countermeasures were also part of the problem.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fentanyl-overdose-death/

Covid is quite capable of killing with a clot when your symptoms aren't to the point that you'll be in the hospital these days. This will show up as a stroke or a heart attack or pulmonary embolism--and if the docs don't put in the effort they won't know it was Covid (and for that matter it can't be proven anyway--lethal clots happen even without Covid. While it's a reasonable presumption that Covid caused the clot there's no proof in any given case.) There's also a lot of families that don't want Covid on the death certificate--even more reason the clot won't be attributed to Covid.

(And, yes, there are plenty of other ways clots can kill--I'm just looking at the cases that are likely to kill without ever reaching the hospital.)

Undertakers have also been noticing this--lots of bodies showing Covid clotting even though they aren't reported as Covid deaths.

Edit: I forgot an additional factor. If you do survive your Covid hospital stay you have a substantially elevated all-cause mortality rate at least for the next year. AFIAK the mechanism has not yet been identified.

(2016) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4969030/

> A recent estimate of SCD incidence ranged from 1 in 40,000 to 1 in 80,000 athletes per year.

[1] https://byrambridle.com/

I live in a protest corridor, and the “freedom lovers” were demanding that we sacrifice the weak and old so that they could enjoy not getting a vaccine. It’s a gross type of mental illness.

They have graphs with excess deaths by age groups and you can see that 2021 looks worse than 2020, with a noticeable upwards trend starting around week 16 of 2021.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/analysis-thousands-more-usual-dyi...

Mainstream articles are biased with the spin of the situation but the facts are there. It goes over some causes of deaths - mostly heart/clotting issues, exactly what you’d expect from the vaxx. That’s why we call it the “clot-shot”

In England people who took the vaxx are twice as likely to die as those who don’t:

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/vaccinated-english-adult...

If you want an opposing view of that data read this fact-check:

https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-coronavirus-britai...

Notice how they don’t deny the statistic. They just say it’s taken “out of context” because covid deaths, and vaccines save lives. No matter how they spin it they can’t deny government data says vaccinated 18-59 are much more likely to die. That’s a fact, even though it’s marked as false by Reuters.

The timing of the vaccine roll out is of course related to the timing of the pandemic. So it's expected that we would see some loose correlation in timing between the different events related to the pandemic.

Things such as increase in mental issues and increased drug consumption due to loneliness, lack of medical care due to overflowed hospitals or loss of income etc. all took time to build up once the pandemic started. Just as it took time to manufacture and distribute a vaccine once the pandemic started.

Just like some jobs are now hiring in "any state but Colorado", since if they hire in Colorado they have to post salary on the job description.

I just don't take it seriously anymore. Track 200 factors, 200 businesses, or 200 industries and you will see 1 event per year. Track all of the above and you will see 40,000 such events in a year.

More to the point, their actuarial model was probably wrong, not reality. Somewhere buried in their model were assumptions excluding black swan events

E.g. a "once in 200 years drought" in California might happen at the same time as a "once in 200 years over-mortality event" in Indiana.

News would tend to report on these, so we see many of these even though they are rare.

Think of the number of hundred year floods you see reported on each year. Then look at the number of floodplains that your news source would report on...

I wonder if the 1 in 200 year example wasn't communicated very well; it could be the actuaries view a long-lasting 10% increase to be the 1 in 200 year event; it does sound low for a single year stress.

I'm not saying that they're actively lying, but it seems some assumptions in these frequentist's numbers are just not correct.

Past performance is not indicative of future results.

I don't know if it's a once in 200 years event or not, but this is a US insurance company, presumably talking about numbers in the US. Aside from ww2, in which the US had around 400,000 deaths, the number of Americans who have died in wars or disasters has been fairly small relatively.

Even the 400,000 for WW2 was over four years, whereas the US has had around 400,000 covid deaths a year for the last two years, and even more if you just look at excess mortality (however the population is obviously larger now than during ww2).

"Experts" making such a statement usually assume the variable in question to be standard distributed – which is close enough to the truth for non-extreme outcomes. But a lot of variables do not behave like the perfect standard distribution at all: due to non-linear effects and self-enforcing feedback loops, their distribution deviates more and more from the standard distribution the more extreme their values gets (they are "fat-tailed"). Referring to the n-sigma of such extreme events is plain and simple stupid, because there's no such thing as a standard deviation (or variance) for a fat-tailed distribution.

Obviously, we don't have other pandemics' data to lean on. But we did have the economic crisis circa 2007 - 2008. There was plenty of analysis about the socio-economic impact of that event. That is, for example, poverty rate goes up, so does X, Y and Z.

If we can model a pandemic, can we not also - at least try - to mobel the impact of "the cure" and possible collateral damage?

The numbers on vaccine complications are almost certainly underreported, you could surmise this just by observing how they have made every effort to shut down any negative media about it to prevent "vaccine hesitancy".

Perhaps it's not the vaccines even, but mistakes during administration from undertrained or exhausted medical workers (i.e. malpractice). At any rate the media appears to be making no fuss about the increasing number of young people getting heart attacks.

I don’t think it’s any secret that the last two years have been poor for people’s mental & physical health. It stands to reason that we’re going to be feeling the consequences of the pandemic & pandemic mitigation efforts for quite some time.

However, it's obvious Omicron is absolutely exploding--the testing system is completely swamped at this point so we don't know the real rate. That's enough to say that by now the 72% likely is right.

I'm not suggesting they are suppressing or missing anything, but I would suggest we stay open to both possibilities.

In other words: because of selection at the gate for long life you can get up to 50-70% lower premiums than the standard table assumes. So this insurer is having quite the scare.

It’s one of the reasons why many EU insurers have balanced portfolios (and are strongly favored by regulation to be balanced). Long life, short life, pensions all in a basket with reinsurance to get these risks of the books. Throw in some P&C and A&H books as well (lower incidence of traffic accidents for example) and the company could be robust to corona. Now the interest rate and inflation, that’s a different story.