COVID-19 Actuaries Response Group

How Soon to See the Vaccine’s Benefits?

Bulletin 93 | John Roberts

The UK government has set a challenging target of immunising over 13 million people by February 15th, representing the most vulnerable groups of society, together with health and care workers (priority groups 1 to 4). This bulletin explores the rate at which we might see the benefits of this programme in terms of the key metrics used to monitor the pandemic.

We expect that the impact of a successful vaccination programme will be most obvious in the hospitalisation and deaths data, with material reductions in hospitalisation starting from mid-February and reported deaths in early March. The impact on cases is expected to be seen sooner, but the reduction is likely to be smaller.

The recent announcement that the second dose of the vaccine will not be administered until twelve weeks after the first, in order to prioritise as many first inoculations as possible, is not discussed in the bulletin.

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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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