Death claims close to levels of years before pandemic

SA’s five largest life insurers have seen recent death claims against fully underwritten life policies edge closer to pre-pandemic levels.

The Death Claims Dashboard, maintained by the Continuous Statistical Investigation (CSI) committee of the Actuarial Society of SA (ASSA), shows that 617 death claims were received in August 2022. That is the lowest level since April 2020 when 540 death claims were submitted just as the Covid-19 pandemic began to take hold.

Anja Kuys, chair of the ASSA CSI committee, says death claims for fully underwritten new-generation life policies typically hovered between 600 and 700 a month in pre-pandemic years. However, in the midst of the pandemic the number of monthly death claims received by SA’s five largest life insurers rose rapidly from June 2020, peaking above 2,700 per month in January 2021 and again in July 2021.

The dashboard shows that of the 31,520 death claims received by the five insurers (Old Mutual, Liberty, Sanlam, Momentum Metropolitan Holdings and Discovery) since the pandemic began in March 2020 until August 2022, only 4,706 claims were due to confirmed Covid-19 deaths. Death claims for policyholders who died due to Covid19 started dropping to singledigit numbers from March 2022, reaching zero for the first time in

August. However, Kuys says the actual number of Covid-19 deaths is likely to be much higher than this figure suggests, as claim forms usually do not specify the virus as being the cause of death. Claim forms typically only state whether the death was due to natural or unnatural causes.

“What is clear, however, is that Covid-19 is no longer claiming as many lives as it did in 2020 and 2021,” she said.

The Death Claims Dashboard was designed to track excess death claims against fully underwritten new-generation individual life policies due to Covid-19 to help life insurers put aside adequate capital reserves and guide accurate pricing of future policy benefits. Claims statistics for the dashboard are submitted by five of the country’s biggest life insurers, representing about 85% of South African individual life insurance premiums and about 2.09-million fully underwritten life policies.

The dashboard shows that males accounted for more than two-thirds of overall death claims from March 2020 to August 2022. Of the 31,520 death claims received by SA’s five insurers over that period, no less than 20,900 were from male policyholders more than 66% of the total.

There was also a clear age bias with almost 80% of deaths from March 2020 to August 2022 occurring among policyholders who were 50 years and older.