The current view is, that life expectancy will continue to rise. The evolution of life expectancy is the balance of all (positive and negative) circumstances that impact life expectancy. Implicit in our projections is the assumption that, as in the past, new developments will keep occurring that bring about further increases in life expectancy. This may be, for instance, medical or technological developments or developments related to lifestyle and environment. Mortality developments observed in the past also had multiple causes, such as changes in smoking behaviour, improvements in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases and an increased regard for a healthy lifestyle. The covid-19 outbreak may also impact life expectancy. At this time, it is hard to gauge these effects, because much is still unclear. Although 2020 will show a significant excess mortality, it is unclear what the effects will be in subsequent years. The absence or availability of a vaccine is of great importance to this. Chapter 8 explores the possible effects of covid-19 by calculating a number of sensitivity analyses. Because of the fact that extrapolation techniques had to be used to obtain data points that were not yet available, these sensitivity analyses are not part of the AG2020 model. 4.3 What happened since the release of Projections Life Table AG2018? A number of analyses were conducted to explore further model refinements. The analyses conducted were in part prompted by questions and suggestions from the profession after the publication of AG2018. The analyses have led to two adjustments. Firstly, constant terms were added to the projection of the Dutch deviation from Europe. Also, the sample length for the Dutch deviation was shortened. As a result, the projection model AG2020 is further improved and meets the standards set by the Mortality Research Committee for a good model. 4.4 Publication of Projections Life Tables on the AG website AG published Projections Life Table AG2020, including the technical specifications of the projection model, on its website. Refer to www.ag-ai.nl/ActuarieelGenootschap/ Publicaties. Also listed there are Excel files with the data sets that can be used to reproduce the estimations of the model’s parameters. Projections Life Table AG2020 Introduction Projections Life Table AG2020 13
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