Friday "Fun": U.S. Mortality Update, Podcast on iTunes, and Movember Launch

Always on the move.... but that's not why it's Movember

I could put the BISY BACKSON sign up, but I can share a few things I’ve been busy with.

Society of Actuaries mortality report

2021 Provisional U.S. Population Mortality Key Observations – you will see a familiar name as author (mine). Yes, I’ve written about these trends many times on the blog before, but here it is in convenient high-level summary form, by age group and sex.

I’ll grab one graphic from the PDF for now:

The summary:

• In provisional data for 2021, general population mortality for the United States was worse than seen in 2020 along multiple dimensions, though a few groups saw improvement compared to 2020.

• The crude death rate increased 2.4% in 2021, and the age-adjusted death rate increased 2.8%. The period life expectancy decreased 0.9 years in 2021. These three mortality metrics demonstrated the continuing effects of pandemic (and non-pandemic) excess mortality in 2021, after larger effects in 2020.

• Males had a 3.5% increase in age-adjusted death rate in 2021, while females saw a 1.8% increase. Males saw higher mortality increases in 2020 and 2021, reversing some of the relative mortality improvements seen in pre-pandemic times.

• By age groups, the worst relative experience during 2019-2021 was seen by those in working ages, especially the age 35-44 group, which had a cumulative 49% increase in death rate over the period. Adults in retirement age had a less relative increase in mortality, with the age 65-74 group with the greatest cumulative effect, at 26% increase in death rates from 2019 to 2021. Children under age 15 did not have much mortality increases over the period, with the age 5-14 group showing only a 9% cumulative increase from 2019 to 2021.

I plan on talking about some of the items in this paper in next week’s podcast.

STUMP – Death and Taxes podcast now available on Apple Podcasts.

This took more wrangling than I expected. The STUMP – Death and Taxes podcast I do through the substack site has an RSS feed: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/32636/s/14350.rss.

My understanding was that was sufficient for getting the podcast on various services, and that the preference generally was to get on Apple Podcasts first.

It took a lot more wrangling than I expected.

In any case, here is the link in all its glory:

I wish I could say, as per the Heart of Gold in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.” – but if you run into trouble, please let me know at marypat.campbell@gmail.com, because I’m still trying to figure this crap out.

Movember is back!

Well, it will be back next week.

That’s Stu as Rob Zombie in the upper right there. He actually grew out his beard for that costume that year…. but yeah the rest is a wig.

But he used to have long hair (for a man… mine was always longer)

Then he was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer in 2017. As the doc said after the CT scan – he lit up like a Christmas tree. It was everywhere. And especially, it was in his bones. It’s not curable, but it’s treatable.

Five years later, the cancer is still there, but the load is less. And also, Stu has less hair. The beard is definitely less Rob Zombie-esque.

I can’t do the standard Movember challenge (shave off all the facial hair and grow a moustache), but I can fundraise, which I’ve done every year since 2017. Here’s my graph from last year:

Well, that’s definitely going to be a challenge for me to meet or beat. But let’s get there!

Let’s help a Bro out this Movember!

Movember 2021 posts:

• Movember Fundraising: Do It For Stu

• Movember: The Improvement in Prostate Cancer Mortality

• Movember Inspiration: My Dad and the Sex Gap in Mortality

• Movember Fundraising: Men and Suicide