Life Insurance and Coronavirus

Year 10, Year 11 and Year 12 students were invited to attend a fascinating talk this week led by Grace Harrison. Grace is an insurance actuary for Royal London Life Insurance. Her job is to analyse statistical models to calculate projected risk for individuals, including assessing mortality, morbidity and longevity. In the light of COVID, Grace firstly explained the vocabulary surrounded the pandemic, including phrases such as excess deaths and the 'r rate,' then looked at the factors informing the computer modelling currently being used to assess the risk of the pandemic in the UK. She relayed how very small changes in data assumption can have dramatic implications in outcomes for modelling the impact of the coronavirus. The limitations and usefulness of such models were also discussed. As a life insurance actuary, Grace has an interesting perspective and presented some very interesting graphs tracing mortality rates in the UK over the past 40 years.

Mrs Doran

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