If our retirees were dying at a greater rate than before Covid-19, than we would be able to reduce the contributions/reserves for our legacy pension plans. That has not been the situation. It has had close to zero impact.
If employees were dying at a higher rate, our life insurance premiums would be going up. We haven’t seen this either.
The only impact of Covid we see in our benefits data is that utilization of health care and dental care overall has increased in 2022 likely due to people foregoing non-critical care in 2020 and 2021.
This is an 80,000 employee company which includes about 25,000 US employees and about 30,000 European employees.
When I start hearing about large pension plans suddenly being flush with excess cash due to all these excess deaths, this will be more believable.