COVID-19 Actuaries Response Group

The Friday Report – Issue 29

20 November 2020

Issue 29 | By Matt Fletcher, Dan Ryan, John Roberts

In this issue we touch on:

Vaccine breaking news

BioNTech / Pfizer

Moderna

AstraZeneca / University of Oxford

– COVID-19 attacking brain astrocytes

– News on Tocilizumab from the REMAP-CAP trial

– Personalised risk prediction from Medicare

– Benefits of universal mask use

– COVID-19 at the cellular level

– Imperial College Reports

How can we keep schools and universities open?

Modelling ICU capacity under different epidemiological scenarios

– London school of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Assessment of tiered restrictions and a second lockdown

– Demographic and Occupational Influences in Hospital Staff

– ONS Infectivity Update

– R Estimate

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Matthew Fletcher

Senior Consultant - AON

Matt has over 20 years’ consultancy experience, including over 10 years as a specialist in mortality and longevity. He works in Aon’s Demographic Horizons team, advising insurance companies and pension funds on setting best estimates and evaluating risk for longevity and other demographic assumptions, both in the UK and overseas.

Matt chairs the CMI Self-Administered Pension Schemes (SAPS) Committee, which produces mortality tables that are used extensively in the pensions and insurance industries.

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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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