U.S. public health officials recorded 1.47 million deaths during the first 26 weeks of the year, according to preliminary figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The number is 5.4% lower than the number of deaths the CDC recorded for the first 26 weeks of 2024, but it's still 10.6% higher than the number the agency recorded for the comparable period in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic came to light.
The U.S. death count was 13.8% higher for the first 13 weeks of this year than in the comparable period in 2019, and it was 6.9% higher for the second 13-week period of this year than in the comparable period in 2019.
Mary Pat Campbell, a longtime life, health and annuity actuary, reviewed the CDC numbers and said the increase appears to be the result of a real increase in the death rate.
"This seems to be coming from multiple causes of death, not only flu/pneumonia," Campbell said via email.
What it means: Clients who want to protect their financial plans against longevity risk have a problem: It's still not clear whether and when U.S. mortality might return to the levels seen before 2020.
An increase in the risk of death means some clients may have less life insurance than they need.
Clients planning for retirement face an even more complicated problem: They might have a shorter life expectancy than they originally believed, because of COVID, post-COVID health effects, the effects of COVID on the health care system or other factors. But they might also have a longer life expectancy than they originally believed, because they are strong enough to have survived whatever has increased U.S. mortality over the past five years.
The data: Some of the earliest U.S. death information available comes from the death count data that the National Center for Health Statistics, an arm of the CDC, uses to determine whether the country is suffering from a flu outbreak or other infectious disease outbreak severe enough to be classified as an epidemic.
The CDC death data covers the entire U.S. population.
Life and annuity issuers use more detailed data for the kinds of people who buy their products to decide whether to sell people the products and, in some cases, set the prices for the products.
People who buy life insurance policies and annuity contracts tend to have higher income and educational levels than the general population and lower mortality rates.
Annuity buyers tend to have especially low mortality rates.
Campbell's views: Campbell is active in actuarial organizations, blogs about mortality and has advised the Insurance Collaboration to Save Lives, a group that wants to help life and annuity issuers do more to improve their customers' health.
Analyzing the preliminary CDC death figures is difficult, partly because information about causes of death takes much longer to firm up, Campbell said.
Getting data about the ages of people who have died and other demographic factors also takes time.
One factor increasing the number of U.S. deaths is the aging of the population. More Americans have reached the ages when mortality rates are high.
But Campbell said she thinks overall mortality is really higher than it was before 2020.
"This is not merely a result of the aging of the population in general," she said.
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