Mortality rates 2019: Making sense of the moving goal posts

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) have given followers of mortality rates two interesting reports this month. One had seemingly very bad news about higher numbers of suicides in 2018 for the UK. This was followed three days later by one with seemingly very good news about lower rates of deaths in England per 100,000 population so far in 2019 than we've seen in recent years. Both of these obviously have potential to inform life insurers about changes they could anticipate about their own populations of policyholders and applicants. The only trouble is, as we learned last week, w...