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

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

#191
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming risk is evenly distributed between birth and death, you would expect a 1 in 80 chance of dying in any given year. But since the risk is loaded towards the later years of life, 1 in 200 during the earlier years sounds about right. Perhaps it's 2x higher than I would have guessed otherwise, but it's the right order of magnitude.

No that is bad math around 1/80. If the average person had a 1/80 chance to die each year, the average life expectancy would be 40 years. Think about this another way. You have a gun with 80 chambers and 1 bullet. How many times on average can you point it at your head and pull the trigger before it goes off? Would you still argue 80 times? On average it is the last chamber?

Are you sure? Is it not the same as this: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1009490/average-num...

E = p/(1-p)

So pretty close to 80 years, no?

I guess it gets more complicated because you'd die of other reasons as you age so there's no point including the eventualities where you reached 120 for example... I guess it gets pretty complicated in the end...

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

#192
This story [1] (NYT paywall) is clearer IMHO:

1. 600,000 more elderly Americans, or 1 of 100, have died during the Covid epidemic than would have died had the epidemic not occurred.

2. 200,000 more non-elderly Americans, or 1 of 1,400, have died—but that's mostly ages 15-64, so more like 1 in 1,000 adults of working age.

3. The CDC says adult death rates were up 20%. [2]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/us/covid-deaths-elderly-a...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db427.htm#secti...

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

#193

> Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.” Do we have an actuarial crisis on our hands? We’ve seen the same thing in finance, disaster preparedness and other unrelated industries. We have “once in 200 years” events happening it seems far more often than once in 200 years. And how does it…

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

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I commented on this elsewhere, but I think your point is fair. Many real-world processes follow power laws, but they are modeled as normal distributions. The issue with that is that a power law can "look like" a normal distribution, except it has fat tails, where you get these "once until the heat death of the universe" type events much more frequently.

Black Swan by Nassim Taleb is an entire book about this very common mistake. It's a case where highly-educated people often make errors that laypersons would not.

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

#195

> Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.” Do we have an actuarial crisis on our hands? We’ve seen the same thing in finance, disaster preparedness and other unrelated industries. We have “once in 200 years” events happening it seems far more often than once in 200 years. And how does it…

> We have “once in 200 years” events happening it seems far more often than once in 200 years.

Past performance is not indicative of future results.

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

#196

Here's an interesting video about an increase in sports-related deaths and heart-attacks. Maybe it's related? https://rumble.com/vpnxkr-are-these-side-effects-extremely-r...

it's not really a video about increase of deaths and heart-attacks - it's just a video that compiles all sorts of sport-related deaths and heart-attacks, we do not actually know if there's an increase or not, since no data from before 2020 was presented

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

#197

I feel like article like this one are commonly used by the anti-vaccine community. They point to those ominous, rising death numbers and understand them as evidence for the dangers of mRNA vaccines. It would therefore (among other reasons) be helpful to understand where exactly that rise in numbers comes from, is it vaccines (which I don't think, else we'd be seeing a similar spike in, say, Europe)? Or is it being ca…

Official numbers for Europe are available at https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

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.

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

#198

> Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.” Do we have an actuarial crisis on our hands? We’ve seen the same thing in finance, disaster preparedness and other unrelated industries. We have “once in 200 years” events happening it seems far more often than once in 200 years. And how does it…

No post body was provided.

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

#199

> "The CDC weekly death counts, which reflect the information on death certificates and so have a lag of up to eight weeks or longer, show that for the week ending Nov. 6, there were far fewer deaths from COVID-19 in Indiana compared to a year ago – 195 verses 336 – but more deaths from other causes – 1,350 versus 1,319." So last year more covid deaths (particularly among the elderly), but while those numbers have de…

Very anecdotal but me and everyone I know is in crappy shape and fallen to different coping mechanisms during Covid

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

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2020 and 2021 both saw a sharp rise in fentanyl seizures at the border. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/fentanyl-seizur...

Not sure what fentanyl death rates did in a particular neighborhood in the US, what I know is that CDC reported 100k overdose deaths /year for 2020-2021. That pales in comparison to the 600k excess deaths we had in the first 9 months of the pandemic in the US. Specially if you consider that the overdose deaths did not suddenly appear in 2020.

Numbers are tricky though. There’s much less than 100k covid deaths for those under 50. Whereas I would guess that’s the lion share of opioid deaths. 50-64 is another weird inflection point. It’s totally possible for covid to kill 6x as many people but for opioids to have a bigger impact of life expectancy. One 20 year old death is only offset by 60 or so 80 year old deaths.
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