Standardised mortality rates in England & Wales experienced an average 3 per cent decline in 2022 compared to the previous year, according to the Continuous Mortality Investigation (CMI).
The Continuous Mortality Investigation (CMI) has released the latest annual update to the CMI Mortality Projections Model, CMI_2022. Mortality during the pandemic years of 2020–2022, on the other hand, remained noticeably higher than pre–pandemic levels.
The CMI Model, which is frequently used by UK pension schemes and insurance firms for mortality rate assumptions, eliminates the weight of 2020 and 2021 data in its core version in recognition of the unique nature of death data during the pandemic. Even if those years’ unusually high mortality rates have an impact on actuarial calculations, they are unlikely to serve as an accurate predictor of mortality in the future.
The relative stability of mortality rates found in 2022, on the other hand, raises the possibility that they may be relevant to emerging trends. Following discussions with model users, the CMI decided to give the 2022 data a weight of 25 per cent when calibrating CMI_2022, but it left the 2020 and 2021 data unweighted.
Cohort life expectancies at age 65 are around 7 months lower for men and about 6 months lower for women according to CMI_2022, the model’s most recent iteration. These revised predictions take into account the particular difficulties brought on by the pandemic years and reflect the changing landscape of mortality expectations.
CMI Mortality Projections Committee chair Cobus Daneel says: “Mortality rates can be volatile from year to year, but they tend to decrease over time. It is unusual to see three consecutive years where mortality rates are so much higher than the recent trend, even during prior pandemics such as the Asian Flu (1957/58) and the Hong Kong Flu (1968/69). We have to go back to World War II to find a period as unusual as 2020-2022 relative to the preceding five-year average.
“The exceptional nature of mortality in 2020 or 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic meant that we placed no weight on mortality experience for those years. However, more recent data has been less volatile and suggests that mortality may remain higher than our expectations before the pandemic for some time. We have given partial weight to data for 2022 in the CMI Model, which leads to lower life expectancies.
“We made this change after a consultation process and received support from users in the pensions and insurance industry. However, we still encourage users to consider adjusting the model’s parameters to reflect their own portfolios and their views of the impact of the pandemic.”