REGULARS | PRACTICE MANAGEMENT
Living and dying in New Zealand in 2020 Russell Hutchinson looks at how expected mortality rates have been affected by Covid-19.
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ow long will people live? Has that changed much? What has been the impact of Covid-19? Have measures to control Covid-19 made life expectancy longer or shorter? Rarely is there so much interest in mortality data as a subject by general media than over the last couple of months. Financial advice would be a heck of a lot easier to give if we had more certainty. One of the most interesting numbers we could possibly have is the date of death. It would revolutionise retirement planning and destroy insurance planning. Instead we have to live with uncertainty. Most people seem to get along okay knowing this. But they still form a view about how long they may expect to live, and that shapes their view about how bad things would be if they died much earlier. For example: in 1800 few adult men could expect to live much past 50 years – even having navigated the dangerous years of early childhood successfully. It was a tough market for life insurance, and most people relied on family and church to cushion the blows of fate. On the other hand, today, most people expect to live well into retirement, so early death would represent a major blow to their expected fortunes. They are – relatively – keen to agree that they should buy a little insurance cover. 030 | ASSET JULY 2020
How has Covid-19 affected the rate at which people die in New Zealand? It’s complicated, it’s a story that is still unfolding and death rates have, briefly, became very political. First, a baseline. A few months ago, Statistics New Zealand released new period life tables. Based on death rates in New Zealand for 2017-19 they found the following data. •
Life expectancy at birth is 80.0 years for males and 83.5 years for females.
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Life expectancy at age 65 is 19.5 years for males and 21.7 years for females.
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Life expectancy at all ages reduced very slightly from 2016-18 (allowing for revised population estimates).
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Life expectancy at birth has increased by about six months for males and four months for females since 2012-14 (see New Zealand period life tables: 2012-14).
More detail will be made available later this year. A brief explanation of how these numbers work: period life expectancy is the average length of life remaining at a given age, assuming people experience the age-specific death rates of a specific period from the given age onwards. For example,
life expectancies for the period 2017-19 are based on death rates for that period and take no account of changes in death rates after 2017-19. As a result, if death rates continue to decline, the period life expectancies will underestimate actual life spans. Or put another way, we have become used to the idea that life expectancy tends to improve over time – so this is not an idle caution. Although this need not necessarily be so. Big public health crises can make a difference. In some parts of the US the life expectancy of some groups is worsening considerably – a major factor is rising deaths due to drug overdoses. In Russia, life expectancy has been falling for some time. Public health experts were very, very worried that we could experience thousands, or even tens of thousands of deaths from Covid-19. We were very fortunate that the first cases took as long to get here as they did. It meant that we had some data from China, and perhaps more importantly, South Korea and Taiwan, to help get our heads around what might happen. Although some people point out that if we closed our border sooner, we could have avoided some of the economic pain of the lockdown, it cannot really be disputed that the lockdown has done a very effective job of controlling Covid-19. We are now in the happy position that,
