COVID-19 Actuaries Response Group

The Friday Report – Issue 40

Bulletin 113 | Dan Ryan and John Roberts

COVID-19 is still one of the hottest topics for scientific papers and articles. The COVID‑19 Actuaries Response Group provides a regular Friday update with a summary of the key papers and analyses that we’ve looked at recently.

In this issue, we look at:

  • Vaccines – testing on children, real-world effectiveness, and uptake
  • Vaccine efficacy for cancer patients
  • Treament – use of Convalescent Serum Therapy
  • Impact of lockdown on sleep and resting heart rates
  • ONS outputs on mortality, infectivity statistics, European comparisons and R

And finally, with our work quoted by the Chief Medical Officer, we see how ‘actuaries’ fare in sign language…

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Dan Ryan

Chief Science Officer - COIOS Research

Dan is an epidemiologist and digital demographer with 25 years experience in the insurance industry.

He led global multi-disciplinary research teams at Swiss Re and Willis Towers Watson in diverse areas including forward-looking risk models, behavioural science and the rapid development of digital ecosystems that will transform how insurance is distributed and how risk is assessed, managed and mitigated.

Dan is an internationally recognised expert on demographic trends, emerging insurance risks and digital innovation. He pioneered the concept of disease-based models of mortality using electronic health records and was a key contributor to the development of the Pandemic Emergency Facility with the Institute of Medicine, WHO and World Bank.

Dan has an MA in Medical Sciences from Cambridge University and an MBA from Heriot-Watt University. He is currently engaged in a DHealth at the University of Bath that is examining the role of medication adherence in improving the management of hypertension in stroke.

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John Roberts

Independent Consultant

John is an independent consultant who has spent 37 years in the life industry, including 17 years at Canada Life and more recently 8 years at Zurich Insurance Group, where he was part of the team that established its corporate risk business, now well established in the market. Following that he was Head of the Life Pricing team at Zurich for 5 years, overseeing a wide range of wealth and protection propositions.

At Zurich he helped establish its small pension scheme longevity swap proposition, which involved setting up simultaneous reinsurance transactions to mirror the client contracts. He has most recently continued with this line of interest as a consultant, supporting Lloyds Banking Group in establishing its first longevity swap transactions.

John is a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries.

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