I guess that would depend on the manner of the prison population decrease. Returned to society vs death, for example.
Given the size of the drops, and the age of the prison population, I’m guessing most of it isn’t deaths.
I actually read the original post here:
And the claim is that while there was initial drops in prison populations due to releases, there have not been much in the way of additional releases (other than usual due to time served), and most of the decrease has been due to lack of new entrants.
The lack of new entrants, of course, could be due to court systems not operating due to lockdowns, etc.
Initial results for state ranking – increase in all-cause mortality for 2020-2021
Tile Grid Map:
NC is a lying liar who lies, so don’t trust that one. The Hawaii number looks good, I think.
And I saw that the Economist had a piece trying out something re: liberal prosecutors and spikes in homicides. And that doesn’t work, either.
I think it’s going to be tough to have a strong model.
How is the adjustment for age done?
What is the major cause, you think? Drug overdoses?
Age-adjustment is just a weighted average, where it’s a standard set of weights by age.
(I have the weights saved somewhere, but they’re just built into CDC WONDER… and you can pick different age-weighted standards. The one they use by default is the 2000-reference population.)
The main driver is, of course, COVID.
You can look over here:
https://community-new.goactuary.com/t/covid-mortality/1326/724?u=meep
There are residual non-COVID causes, obviously, and drug overdoses are a big influence at younger ages. But other causes having effects: diabetes, Alzheimers disease. Actually, I’d have to look for 2021 stuff – I know the diabetes & Alzheimers effect continues into 2021, but some of the effects I know were from 2020 and may have been actually COVID misdiagnosed.
Thank you. I see “All causes” now.
Sorry, just edited to make that more explicit
Here’s the post:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/rise-in-non-covid-19-deaths-hits-life-insurers-11645576252
And numbers guy has helpfully copied over all the text and graphics below.
To avoid confusion, I’ve deleted the original wrongly-placed post and just put the text here:
text and pictures and graphs and ads
Rise in Non-Covid-19 Deaths Hits Life Insurers
Companies believe lack of medical treatment during pandemic has contributed to deaths from other causes
Among other insurance executives, Hartford Financial CEO Christopher Swift has noted an outsize number of benefit claims for non-Covid-19-specific deaths.
PHOTO: JULIE BIDWELL FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
By
Updated Feb. 23, 2022 5:36 am ET
U.S. life insurers, as expected, made a large number of Covid-19 death-benefit payouts last year. More surprisingly, many saw a jump in other death claims, too.
Industry executives and actuaries believe many of these other fatalities are tied to delays in medical care as a result of lockdowns in 2020, and then, later, people’s fears of seeking out treatment and trouble lining up appointments.
Some insurers see continued high levels of these deaths for some time, even if Covid-19 deaths decline this year.
In earnings calls for the past two quarters, Globe Life Inc.,Hartford Financial Services Group Inc., Primerica Inc. andReinsurance Group of America Inc. were among insurers noting higher non-Covid-19 deaths, compared with pre-pandemic baselines.
“The losses we are seeing continue to be elevated over 2019 levels due at least in part, we believe, to the pandemic and the existence of either delayed or unavailable healthcare,” Globe Life finance chief Frank Svoboda told analysts and investors earlier this month.
Among the non-coronavirus-specific claims are deaths from heart and circulatory issues and neurological disorders, he said. “We anticipate that they’ll start to be less impactful over the course of 2022 but we do anticipate that we’ll still at least see some elevated levels throughout the year,” he said.
Primerica executives similarly cautioned in their fourth-quarter call about outsize numbers of non-Covid-19 deaths in 2022. “Some of these will be the result of delayed medical care or the increased incidence of societal-related issues, such as the increased prevalence of substance abuse,” Chief Financial Officer Alison Rand said in an email interview.
From early stages of the pandemic, many medical professionals have raised concerns about Americans’ untreated health problems, as Covid-19 put stress on the nation’s healthcare system.
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Trade group American Council of Life Insurance said the pandemic in 2020 drove the biggest annual increase in death benefits paid by U.S. carriers since the 1918 influenza epidemic, totaling billions of dollars. The hit to the industry’s bottom line has been less than initially feared, however, because many victims have been older people who typically have smaller policies, if any coverage.
Still, Covid-19 and other excess deaths have cut into many carriers’ quarterly earnings, especially as deaths linked to the Delta variant increased for people in their working years with employer-sponsored death benefits. “Earnings impacts have been material and there still appears to be some Covid-19 discount, but investors are starting to look through mortality claims costs,” said Andrew Kligerman,
a stock analyst with Credit Suisse Securities.
Industrywide, death-benefit claims usually vary only slightly year-to-year, so the recent increases are outside the norm.
Non-Covid-19 excess deaths jumped in last year’s third quarter, after negligible or modest counts in earlier quarters, some life insurers said. Those numbers line up with results from an ongoing Covid-19 survey of 20 of the nation’s leading sellers of group-life insurance to employers by the Society of Actuaries Research Institute.
In the third quarter, the survey shows, incurred claims counts were 37.7% higher than a pre-pandemic baseline, with a nearly 50-50 split between claims directly tied to Covid-19 and those that weren’t, according to R. Dale Hall, managing director of research at the society, a professional organization. The group is still assessing fourth-quarter data.
New studies offer clues about who may be more susceptible to long Covid, a term for lingering Covid-19 symptoms. WSJ breaks down the science of long Covid and the state of treatment. Illustration: Jacob Reynolds for the Wall Street JournalTHE WALL STREET JOURNAL INTERACTIVE EDITION
The third-quarter non-Covid-19 excess claims were 19%, compared with 18.7% for Covid-19 claims, Mr. Hall said. Non-coronavirus-specific excess claims hadn’t topped 6.4% in previous quarters.
In discussing third-quarter results with analysts, Hartford Financial Chief Executive Christopher Swift said the company had “experienced higher levels of non-Covid excess mortality during the quarter,” including heart, stroke and cancer causes of death.
He said the company’s experience with such claims “has been very bouncy over the last six quarters so I don’t see a trend per se,” beyond those seeming “to indicate maybe a second-order effect with Covid and people not taking care of themselves.” The insurer is one of the nation’s biggest group-benefits providers.
At nonpublicly traded OneAmerica Financial Partners, another group-life-insurance seller, claims for working-age adults ran at about 140% of a pre-pandemic baseline during the third quarter, CEO J. Scott Davison said.
About two-thirds of these excess deaths are Covid-19-specific, he said. Of the remainder, in addition to deaths driven by deferred medical care, Mr. Davison’s team believes that some may stem from earlier Covid-19 infections. He cited scientific research indicating that the virus may pave the way for future medical complications, so survivors may “later die from the toll Covid has taken on their bodies.”
The impact on the cost of life insurance from Covid-19 both directly and indirectly is unclear. Some insurers say they are repricing group-life contracts modestly on the assumption that the virus will be around at least through 2022. Those contracts are typically repriced every couple of years. Meanwhile, insurers are still trying to determine what implications there may or may not be on long-term mortality.
Write to Leslie Scism at leslie.scism@wsj.com
FWIW, those who receive Conning Commentary should note the February 2022 issue had a piece titled “U.S. Excess Mortality: Disproportionate Effect in Working Age Adults”, and I had some stuff about the concerning amount of non-COVID sources of that excess mortality, and not necessarily unique to 2021Q3/Q4… it’s on the front of the issue…
Separately, I’ve been doing a series of videos about how to pull data from the CDC WONDER database.
To be sure, I don’t think actuaries really need the help – it’s a fairly simple set-up – but in case some people from outside our club show up here…
Working with WONDER playlist:
Showing the differences in different reference populations in age-adjusted death rates:
this stuff, packaged in a blog post
Doing a twitter poll – please vote!
(it’s okay to cheat, if you know how to cheat)…
Seems more like a quiz.
will not vote.
but only because I do not twitter.
I want people to guess, based on their gut feeling, because I found the answer to be interesting (and I’ll have the answer in tomorrow’s post).
I don’t know how much to rely on these studies, but I have heard that if you quiz/poll people about something factual that they may not know anything about, and then teach them about the answer, they’re more likely to pay attention to the answer/remember it. Because now you’ve got their attention… either it cements that they were correct in their intuition, or maybe they’re surprised by the real answer.
OK, I’ll guess, here: 20-24, hod-rodding around on empty roads.
If it’s an age group not included in your “poll”, I will be very pissed, and not follow you on twitter ever again.
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I mean, more so!