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OneAmerica is a $100 billion insurance company that has had its headquarters in Indianapolis since 1877. The company has approximately 2,400 employees and sells life insurance, including group life insurance to employers in the state.
Davison said the increase in deaths represents "huge, huge numbers," and that's it's not elderly people who are dying, but "primarily working-age people 18 to 64" who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.
"And what we saw just in third quarter, we're seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic," he said.
"Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic," he said. "So 40% is just unheard of."
He said at the same time, the company is seeing an "uptick" in disability claims, saying at first it was short-term disability claims, and now the increase is in long-term disability claims.
"For OneAmerica, we expect the costs of this are going to be well over $100 million, and this is our smallest business. So it's having a huge impact on that," he said.
At the same news conference where Davison spoke, Brian Tabor, the president of the Indiana Hospital Association, said that hospitals across the state are being flooded with patients "with many different conditions," saying "unfortunately, the average Hoosiers' health has declined during the pandemic."
In a follow-up call, he said he did not have a breakdown showing why so many people in the state are being hospitalized - for what conditions or ailments. But he said the extraordinarily high death rate quoted by Davison matched what hospitals in the state are seeing.
"What it confirmed for me is it bore out what we're seeing on the front end,..." he said.
The number of hospitalizations in the state is now higher than before the COVID-19 vaccine was introduced a year ago, and in fact is higher than it's been in the past five years, Dr. Lindsay Weaver, Indiana's chief medical officer, said at a news conference with Gov. Eric Holcomb on Wednesday.
Just 8.9% of ICU beds are available at hospitals in the state, a low for the year, and lower than at any time during the pandemic. But the majority of ICU beds are not taken up by COVID-19 patients - just 37% are, while 54% of the ICU beds are being occupied by people with other illnesses or conditions.
Collins and Fauci played critical roles in designing and advocating for the pandemic lockdown strategy adopted by the United States and many other countries. In emails written four days after the Great Barrington Declaration and disclosed recently after a FOIA request, it was revealed that the two conspired to undermine the declaration. Rather than engaging in scientific discourse, they authorized "a quick and devastating published takedown" of this proposal, which they characterized as by "three fringe epidemiologists" from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford.
Across the pond, they were joined by their close colleague, Dr. Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust, one of the world's largest nongovernmental funders of medical research. He worked with Dominic Cummings, the political strategist of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Together, they orchestrated "an aggressive press campaign against those behind the Great Barrington Declaration and others opposed to blanket COVID-19 restrictions."
Ignoring the call for focused protection of the vulnerable, Collins and Fauci purposely mischaracterized the GBD as a "let-it-rip" "herd immunity strategy," even though focused protection is the very opposite of a let-it-rip strategy. It's more appropriate to call the lockdown strategy that has been followed a "let-it-rip" strategy. Without focused protection, every age group will eventually be exposed in equal proportion, albeit at a prolonged "let-it-drip" pace compared to a do-nothing strategy.
When journalists started asking us why we wanted to "let the virus rip," we were puzzled. Those words aren't in the GBD, and they are contrary to the central idea of focused protection. It's unclear whether Collins and Fauci ever read the GBD, whether they deliberately mischaracterized it, or whether their understanding of epidemiology and public health is more limited than we had thought. In any case, it was a lie.
We were also puzzled by the mischaracterization of the GBD as a "herd immunity strategy." Herd immunity is a scientifically proven phenomenon, as fundamental in infectious disease epidemiology as gravity is in physics. Every COVID strategy leads to herd immunity, and the pandemic ends when a sufficient number of people have immunity through either COVID-recovery or a vaccine. It makes as much sense to claim that an epidemiologist is advocating for a "herd immunity strategy" as it does to claim that a pilot is advocating a "gravity strategy" when landing an airplane. The issue is how to land the plane safely, and whatever strategy the pilot uses, gravity ensures that the plane will eventually return to earth.
The fundamental goal of the GBD is to get through this terrible pandemic with the least harm to the public's health. Health, of course, is broader than just COVID. Any reasonable evaluation of lockdowns should consider their collateral damage to patients with cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and other infectious diseases, as well as mental health and much else. Based on long-standing principles of public health, the GBD and focused protection of the high-risk population is a middle ground between devastating lockdowns and a do-nothing, let-it rip strategy.
Comment: What isn't making the round in news as much as it should is that Omicron is actually building natural immunity to other variants. As it passes through populations and we see drops in cases, all such 'success' will likely be given to vaccines and continued boosters rather than the natural immunity boost from Omicron.