U.S. Deaths Still 7% Over Pre-COVID Norm in Q2

What You Need to Know

General-population mortality trends may differ from trends for people with life insurance and annuities.
The total number of first-half deaths was about 110,000 higher than the first six months of 2019.
One group would like to see life insurers use voluntary screening tests to learn more about mortality trends.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has bad news for financial advisors who want to build life expectancy into clients’ life insurance and retirement income planning: The U.S. death rate is still running high.

The CDC recorded 728,343 deaths from all causes for the 13-week period ending June 29, according to preliminary death data it publishes along with its weekly influenza tracking reports.

That was 0.8% lower than the number of deaths recorded in the second quarter of 2023, but it was 7% higher than the number of deaths recorded in the second quarter of 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic began.

The second-quarter death count was about 48,000 higher than the number recorded during the comparable period in 2019.

For the first half of 2024, the number of deaths was 7.7% higher than in the first half of 2019, and that total number of deaths was 110,000 higher than in the comparable period in 2019.

What it means: Financial advisors may have to prepare clients for the possibility that life expectancy could be more difficult to predict than it used to be.

In some cases, for example, advisors and tax planners use mortality tables approved by the Internal Revenue Service to perform calculations that limit the amount of tax benefits a client can use in a given year. The required tables may reflect overly optimistic thinking about how long clients will live.

The history: Before about 2015, U.S. life expectancy usually improved every year.

After 2017, opioid use and other problems caused mortality improvement to stall.

Starting in 2020, the COVID pandemic caused three years of sharp increases in the U.S. death rate.