I would expect pre-rapid-ubiquity covid tests had a lot to do with this. Speaking personally, the covid testing sites I went to all loved to charge tests as doctor's visits.
is there a simpler explanation than 'covid deaths are undercounted for political reasons? genuinely asking, since I can think of no other reason for such a huge expense to be incurred by this company.
And because a death of say a heart attack - after a bad case of Covid that weakens the heart - goes down as a "heart attack" instead of Covid. The issue that general deaths are up is genuinely something we should be very worried about. Attributing it to the vaccine because of the year in which it happened is just lazy ass cherry picking.
It seems especially egregious without data since you could claim covid fatigue or higher risk behavior after the introduction of vaccines also caused upticks.
If there were under-reporting in 2021 similar to 2020 then we should see about a 1.06x payout difference in 2021, not 2.64x. Not recording deaths as covid wouldn't affect life insurance payouts. So there would need to be ~2.64x more covid deaths in 2021 (after most folks got the vaccine in March-May) than in 2020 with no vaccines. This doesn't seem right to me. What would explain this is if while covid didn't get much worse in 2021 people are dying more anyway, or the covid deaths are more concentrated in insured people.
Just getting sick doesn't trigger a life insurance payout, but a glance at cumulative cases vs deaths on the data tracker suggests that in 2021 covid is less deadly than in 2020 on a per-case basis. That matches what I see on the news and people around me pretty well.
I suspect that the life insurance vs covid risks skew differently with age. Life insurance policies tend to be high for working people and lower once retired. Since the purpose of life insurance is to replace lost income for the insured's dependents most people drop or reduce their policies when they retire. So that 2.64x factor on payouts should be under the factor for deaths unless the deaths are concentrated in younger, healthier people. I have no idea what that correction would look like so I ignored it.
* Assuming the second half of 2022 which hasn't happened yet looks like the first half. Reality won't be exactly 2x the total so far.
And according to the scientists who actually study this stuff for a living, Covid side effects and long term damage are increasing the likelihood of all kinds of "non-covid related" deaths. that's what we should be scared about - not vaccines.
