The COVID-19 pandemic interrupts the relatively steady trend of improving longevity observed in many countries over the last decades. We claim that this needs to be addressed explicitly in many mortality modeling applications, for example in the life insurance industry. To support this position,...

Mortality shocks such as the one induced by the COVID-19 pandemic have substantial impact on mortality models. We describe how to deal with them in the period effect of the Lee-Carter model. The main idea is to not rely on the usual normal distribution assumption as it is not always justified....