Posted on 01/23/2023 7:03:57 AM PST by Heartlander
p class="has-drop-cap">In a November 30, 2022, speech on “Inflation and the Labor Market,” Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell blamed most of the 3.5 million estimated shortfall in the US labor force on premature retirements. He also blamed a large portion – between 280,000 and 680,000 – on “long Covid.” In a footnote, however, Powell acknowledged a far more somber factor: an estimated 400,000 unexpected deaths among working age people.
It’s easy to blame these deaths on Covid-19. The virus is of course one significant cause. But it’s not nearly the only cause, especially among young and middle-age workers. We need better government data transparency to make a full assessment. Until then, we can proceed with others who track mortality for a living – life insurance companies.
In 2020, Covid-19 took many lives, even among select groups of middle-age people, specifically those with comorbidities such as diabetes. In 2020, Covid did not take very many lives of healthy young and middle-age people – for example, the types of people who are employed at large and mid-size companies and who have group life insurance. As you can see in the chart below, group life insurance benefit payments in 2020 were barely higher than in 2018.
In 2021, however, group life payments exploded by 20.7 percent over the five year average and by 15 percent over the acute pandemic year of 2020. Why would healthy young and middle-age people suddenly begin dying in large numbers in 2021 when they’d navigated 2020 with relative success?
Especially when we consider that in 2021, the US administered 520 million Covid-19 vaccine doses. Shouldn’t healthy people employed in good jobs with good benefits, now protected with vaccines, have fared better in 2021 than in 2020? Surely, overdoses and suicides have risen in recent years. But those causes of death are less prominent among the group life cohorts in general, and the latest data confirm these were not drivers of the group life surge. Curiously, two of the largest spikes in 2021 came from deadly automobile accidents and non-automobile accidents.
Let’s look at a few of these young adult age groups in more detail. In the charts below, we’ve broken out total all-cause deaths into three groups – 30-34, 35-39, and 40-44. Eyeballing the age group charts alone shows that factors other than Covid-19 itself must have driven large portions of the mortality spike in young and middle-age workers. (We are using official statistics, which likely overstate Covid mortality and understate non-Covid mortality. It’s the best we’ve got for now.)
In the three charts above, we estimate 2022* total deaths because November and December are still provisional and subject to upward revisions. We’ve made what we believe are reasonable projections. The % change figures are relative to the 2018-19 average. These are absolute numbers not adjusted for population growth or cohort size.
Covid-19 hit hard in 2020, especially for the old, vulnerable, and comorbid. In other words, Covid-19 took many of the most unhealthy from us in 2020. In principle, therefore, a smaller number unhealthy people might have been susceptible to Covid-19 in 2021 and 2022. High mortality years are often followed by low mortality years. After two successive high mortality years, the third year is even more likely to be low-mortality. For 2022 to be as bad, or somewhat worse, than 2020, is thus a big surprise. Last year’s milder Omicron variants make 2022’s stubbornly high mortality rate even more baffling.
All-cause mortality is crucial to understand whether public health policies are working. All-cause numbers can also help expose faulty reasoning when overly narrow, overly complicated, or overly clever analyses miss or hide important signals. For example, an analysis which purported to show lockdowns reduced Covid deaths but which neglected to show other deaths rose even more, would not reflect the totality of the policy’s effects. Likewise, a chemotherapy which shrinks tumors but kills patients may be successful in its narrow task yet fail the larger mission. Most analysts and health authorities studiously ignored all-cause over the last three years. The all-cause figures above show our Covid policies were far from successful.
For other purposes, however, it’s helpful and even necessary to drill down on specific causes. Important signals can also be lost in large groupings – Simpson’s paradox, for example, is a common statistical illusion. (Few have dug deeper, with as much specificity, as John Beaudoin, an engineer from Massachusetts who gained access to his state’s digital death records for the last eight years. He shows that specific causes of death spike and fall at important moments and periods. CDC data is not organized with such granularity. More on Beaudoin’s analysis in coming weeks…)
We know that recent years saw an upswing in drug overdoses and suicides, which accelerated with the pandemic lockdowns. Although these troubling trends cannot explain the enormous and unprecedented all-cause mortality seen above, we should attempt to account for them. Likewise, although Covid-19 did not cause all these record deaths, it was a significant factor.
So we dig deeper. If we remove both Covid-19 and unnatural deaths (homicide, suicide, overdose, etc.), we see a dramatic spike of natural, non-Covid-19 deaths among working age people beginning in the spring and summer of 2021. The CDC then stopped publishing the detailed data breaking out these particular categories.
But we know this trend continued. In fact, it got much worse. The life insurance companies told us so. On a December 30, 2021, videoconference with the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, OneAmerica CEO Scott Davison reported with shock:
“And what we saw just in third quarter, we’re seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic.”
“40% is just unheard of.”
“It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers.”
Several months later, Lincoln National reported its 2021 payouts were $1.4 billion, versus $548 million in 2020, a 164 percent rise.
As you will remember seeing in our three all-cause charts, August, September, and October of 2021 showed a gigantic upward bubble – the worst ever period of concentrated young and middle-age deaths, at least in modern times.
Heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary embolisms, accidents, and many seemingly-inexplicable sudden deaths, which continued into 2022, and now in 2023. Here is the Society of Actuaries November 2022 update, which goes through June 2022.
Source: Society of Actuaries, Group Life Covid-19 Mortality Survey Report, November 2022.
It’s true that the late summer and fall period of 2021 coincided with the Delta wave in the US, which was more infectious and appeared to be more pathogenic than previous variants. (We’ve suggested the mass vaccination programs may have, by exerting extreme evolutionary pressure, driven convergence onto more infectious, vaccine-evading variants. Brand new research just published in the New England Journal of Medicine continues to bolster our escape variant thesis: Substantial Neutralization Escape by SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variants BQ.1.1 and XBB.1.)
Federal officials and the medical establishment, you will recall, argued in 2021 that it was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Even the Society of Actuaries attempts to explain away its alarming findings by implying the deaths are due to lack of vaccination. It does so with crude regressions of excess mortality and bulk statewide vaccination totals as of June 30, 2021.
But remember those 520 million vaccine doses. How can you generate far more deaths in 2021 – ascribing them to unvaccination – with a dramatically smaller number of unvaccinated people? In 2021, perhaps 20-40 percent of these group life insureds were unvaccinated. In 2020, 100 percent of them were unvaccinated, yet mortality barely rose. The math doesn’t come close to working.
The 40-44 age group, for example, suffered 21.5 percent more total deaths in 2021 than 2020. This terrible outcome occurred with less than half the so-called susceptible population due to their unvaccinated status. It’s difficult to assert robust vaccine effectiveness when both doses-delivered and deaths are skyrocketing.
On the other hand, the group life insurance data show vaccinated groups may have suffered the worse outcomes. By August, most large and mid-size companies and organizations across the country had vaccine mandates, and most employees complied. Yet these workers suffered extraordinary – indeed, totally unprecedented death rates – in 2021, especially the second half of 2021.
Source: Society of Actuaries, Group Life Covid-19 Mortality Survey Report, November 2022.
Ed Dowd, a former BlackRock portfolio manager, points to a crucial peculiarity in his book Cause Unknown. Employed people with group life insurance policies are far healthier than their overall population cohort. They typically die at a significantly lower rate, just 30-40 percent of the overall population. This is an iron actuarial law. In 2021, however, as you can see in the chart directly above, these employed Americans died at excess rates far higher than their larger pool of less healthy peers.
We could also point to fast-rising disability as a key factor in the worker shortage. Fed chair Powell blames it on long Covid. Once again, however, the timing doesn’t fit that story very well.
To overgeneralize:
In 2020, the vulnerable died of Covid at unusually high rates. In 2021 and 2022, Covid continued its assault, but the young, middle-aged, and healthy also died in aberrantly high numbers of something else.
These patterns are repeating across the high-income developed world – Germany, the UK, Japan, South Korea, Australia.
Where’d they go? Living in mom’s basement making Tik Tok videos or playing video games. Sorry to say but this generation does not want to work. Recent studies have shown Gen Z values their time more than financial remuneration. Which, to me, translates into lazy lack of interest in working.
Have a young relative who is a manager with a large national firm and he is ready to change jobs because no one wants to work! Those they can hire are emotionally, psychologically, and physically fragile. It’s like a working daycare.
They value their entertainment. If they valued their time they would not watch Tik Tok videos or play video games.
Where did all the wage increases go?
I’m here - BUT car problems and now the cap on early SSI has my working choices limited. I’m working on the car problems first - at least one.
IF they would remove the cap on early SSI I would work MORE once I got working - more taxes collected for city, state and federal. And more incentive for me.
Hello Republicans - petition to remove the earnings cap on early SSI. You’ll get more workers and better workers, IMMEDIATELY.
Frankly, I’d prefer my old salary and no SSI (because I’d make too much) UNLESS they remove the earnings cap.
I am going out on a limb here, but maybe they took an “experimental” drug
I will join you on that limb and say They graduated from school without learning anything useful, but knowing all the genders and that we will all soon be dead from global warming or whatever is popular junk science, along with Fentanyl and other drugs. But most important, not actually knowing Christ as Savior.
That would be a logical conclusion IF the vaccines were effective.
My son was a GM in a national restaurant chain. He said what he saw was shocking. He couldn’t get people to work more than 1 pay period. They’d start, and work until they got their 1st paycheck, and then not come back. They would then go do whatever they were doing with that money until it ran out, and then get a job somewhere else and do it again. The company was offering signing bonuses (paid out partially over 3-4 paychecks), a good starting salary for the area that they were in, and promises of raises. NONE of it mattered.
My daughter was a GM in a national retail clothing company. She just couldn’t get employees AT ALL.
I have 4 dead and no quitters but with two sheltered with failure to launch
Its no fair looking at total deaths pre jab vs post jab. There is no way to massage the data to protect the public from thinking the obvious explination: the jab is more deadly than covid.
Yep. spoke with an older walmart employee (60 something) and she said the youngsters come in, get their first paycheck and that is it.
Also the really terrible ones think they shouldn’t have to work more than 8 hours a week. So it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. They are so horrid that mgmt. cuts their hours more and more until they eventually don’t bother.
Easier than firing them as most can be litigious activists.
No worries mate...plenty of replacement labor coming across the Southern border.
Only problem? You gotta learn Spanish.
“remove the earnings cap on early SSI”
Great practical suggestion.
My wife works at CVS and the few older workers stick around for years.
The young ones have stunning turnover—if they last a month it is a miracle. Invariably they do no show after no show until finally they are fired once the manager can locate them.
It would help everyone. I had to go part-time last year, earlier than I wanted to.
I don’t want to say it was the vaxx but.........
I am not saying you are wrong, but I can’t get a job anywhere in the McKinney, TX area. I’d even work at a Home Depot. I have a degree from the U.S. Naval Academy, I am a retired Navy Commander, and I also have an MBA and a PMP. I have applied at 100 places in the past month and not one call back. I’ve tried really pairing down my resume. Nothing.
who's gonna live till they are 65?
Im not working Christmas, or thanksgiving, the 4th, or presidents day and I want a paid 2 days for juneteenth!!
cant work, the superbowl is this weekend.
I'll worry about retirement when I hit 60.
Right now I want my nights and weekends off to do things, I dont live to work, Ive got my life to live, and I only want 40 hours a week.
Overtime is for suckers and stupid people.
none of these excuses are made up .. except the juneteenth one, Ive not heard that one, but figured someone has told their boss they were taking juneteenth off.
Not long ago employers had endless lines of applicants and they were able to keep wages stagnant for decades. You could be fired for any reason and they’d have 4 more people waiting to apply..
Those days seem to be long over.
ping
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