He's literally claiming that elderly are not dying at the same rates, based on his internal customer data
...deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18...
Davidson, the CEO in question, directly said "huge, huge numbers" and "primarily working-age people 18..." in his address. However the author of the article, Margaret Menge, added the "that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying" piece.
Essentially Margaret, as explained in another comment, used a literary construction to tie the quotes together. The sentence is being used to convey that contrary to the popular narrative that the pandemic is only killing the elderly, here we have evidence that it's affecting other cohorts as well.
Horrible reporting
My interpretation is that this guy runs an insurance company who insures working age people through their employers. That is the source of the data, so he is missing data on elderly people
Yet he makes a claim that the people he does not have data on are dying at a lower rate than the people he does have data on. This makes no sense, as you can't make a comparison when you simply don't have data on the group you're comparing against
>Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.
Here is the specific part I take issue with:
>it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people
I don’t think it’s any secret that the last two years have been poor for people’s mental & physical health. It stands to reason that we’re going to be feeling the consequences of the pandemic & pandemic mitigation efforts for quite some time.