Make Your Own COVID-19 Mortality Analysis Charts
A new tool shows how factors such as underwriting class and product type affected life claims in early 2021.
A team of actuaries has posted a free web-based dashboard that ordinary people can use to analyze COVID-19 mortality data for people with individual life insurance.
Members of the Individual Life COVID-19 Project Work Group created the dashboard using data contributed by 31 U.S. insurers.
The database includes 3 million individual life insurance claims filed from 2015 through March 31, 2021, along with mortality information for the general population.
The dashboard is aimed at people who know how to use the web but who do not necessarily know anything about statistics or computer programming.
Users can click on different tabs on the dashboard site to see mortality claim data broken down by variables such as sex, face amount, smoker status, attained age and underwriting class.
The smoker status tab, for example, shows that COVID-19 did more to increase the mortality of nonsmokers over the expected levels than it did to increase the actual-to-expected death ratio for smokers.
The underwriting class tab shows that people who went through the life underwriting process and who were in an average, “standard” risk class got through the first quarter of 2021 about as well as preferred risks. People with a risk class of “unknown” suffered a big increase in mortality that quarter.
The product type tab suggests that, in the first quarter of 2021, the effects of COVID-19 on the ratio-of-expected mortality was much smaller for whole life insureds than for term life or universal life insureds.
The work group representatives who developed the data dashboard include actuaries and others from LIMRA, Reinsurance Group of America, the Society of Actuaries and TAI.
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