The risks and consequences of COVID have been globally active for over two years.  With such a passage of time, doctors, scientists, and mathematicians are finally beginning to collect sufficient data to take the politics, posturing, and shallow reporting out of much needed scientifically appropriate mitigation and treatment efforts during this COVID pandemic.

The U.S. life insurance industry is about a $900-billion industry, and its business model is based entirely on understanding the hard numbers of dynamically building actuarial tables of potential clients' statistical probability of getting sick and dying.

Taken from a market research industry report:

Industry Definition

Operators within this industry are primarily engaged in accepting liability under annuities and life, disability income and accidental death and dismemberment insurance policies. Enterprises within this industry include fraternal organizations, privately held insurers, publicly traded insurers and mutual insurance companies.

Main Activities

Underwriting variable deferred annuities
Underwriting fixed rate deferred annuities
Underwriting individual whole life policies
Underwriting group life policies
Underwriting individual universal life policies
Underwriting immediate annuities
Underwriting individual term life policies
Investing insurance premiums

The practical result of collecting and analyzing hard data of all aspects of the COVID health crisis by extremely talented, mathematically gifted individuals, who are most often dedicated apolitical people, working in the life insurance field, will be to take the political posturing out of the national debate about COVID.

Current much more accurate research will build out from the increasing "law of large numbers" data sets.

What Is the Law of Large Numbers?

The law of large numbers, in probability and statistics, states that as a sample size grows, its mean gets closer to the average of the whole population.

I personally suspect that many foolish and often counter-productive government-mandated actions will quietly go away.  Many nasty questions can be resolved, such as vaccine effects on certain individuals with pre-existing medical conditions or age cohorts — mostly the young, who have a very limited risk of dying yet are addressed as if they were the same as the elderly in nursing homes.  Eventually, as treatment modalities progress, politics will leave the debate, and the truth will be the truth of what works and what does not.

When the U.S. government continues to issue guidelines and recommendations about the danger of COVID, much more accurate mitigation policies programs and many medically sound treatment methods will be validated.  Clarification of the statistical probability supported by hard data of deadly outcomes and transmutability of COVID results can hopefully soon avoid the catastrophic economic and physical devastation affecting many services and industries: school attendance at all ages, airline travel, restaurants, and even the cruise ship industry.

Consequently, as hard data about the real risks of potential death are determined by insurance underwriting, a lot of onerous economic and other second-order mandates will finally take the fear-mongering out of play.

For example, data-driven risk-return of teachers refusing to teach at the expense of families' economic well-being, when a parent has to stay home, in their shutting down school and university classrooms will finally have practical data-driven sanity to make a frame of reference.  And as a point of final satisfaction. Dr. Anthony Fauci's making it up as he goes along will finally crash headlong into a hard-data reality.

Another potentially beneficial consequence of following increased medical knowledge, using the ever-evolving law of large numbers, will be to bring sunlight onto the U.S. military's draconian mandatory vaccine mandates that are in effect.

The "my way or the highway mandate" is truly hurting the U.S. Marine Corps.  So far, two Marines have died of COVID, and it has been estimated that perhaps up to 10,000 Marines will be forced out because they refuse vaccination.  So far, none has been given a religious exemption.  Yet a fully vaccinated Navy surface combatant has been taken out of deployment because of a COVID outbreak.

Thus, the forced discharge of Marines under the commandant's guidance of "readiness" rings hollow.  The point is simple: if the duration of being medically down is the same as for the seasonal flu along with an extremely high probability of survival, then why destroy careers?

Ed Timperlake was the first assistant secretary of veterans' affairs when the late Secretary Edward Derwinski determined that adverse effects of Agent Orange were service-connected for compensation, and he created the Desert Storm registry, now the Gulf War registry.  He received a personal letter from President Bush for addressing the toxic effects of the Middle East battlefield.  He spent many months recovering as a Marine pilot affected by Hepatitis E while serving in South East Asia.

Image: EpicTop10.com via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.