Horizon follows medical, social and demographic developments across countries: how populations age, get ill and get cared for, and how long they live. This page explains where what you read here comes from, how it is chosen, and what we will and will not say about it.
What we publish, and what we don't
Everything on this site is there to inform. We report what a study found and how good the evidence is, what the official figures are and when they were last revised, where authoritative sources disagree and why, and how the methods behind the numbers work. We say when a body of evidence is building or contested, and what would change our reading of it.
We do not publish assumptions. Nothing here says what mortality improvement to expect, which projection to adopt, or what a finding means for a particular scheme, portfolio or policy. Turning evidence into assumptions is judgement applied to someone's specific position, and it is the work COIOS does under engagement. Where the site shows a projection, it is an official one, and the point is to show how it fared against events, not to offer one of our own.
The line is deliberate. It keeps what is published here free, public and the same for every reader, and it keeps the advice where it belongs, with the person who is accountable for it.
Where the material comes from
We read three kinds of source, and only these.
The research literature. Standing searches run against PubMed, Europe PMC and the medRxiv and bioRxiv preprint servers, on questions we follow: the population effects of incretin-based therapies, early-onset cancer incidence, the implementation of genomic medicine, respiratory-season mortality and vaccine effectiveness, antimicrobial resistance, the financing of long-term care, social isolation and its consequences, ageing in place, unpaid care, healthy life expectancy, later-life work, fertility decline and its projection, the stall in mortality improvement, revisions to population projections, changes in cause-of-death coding, and the methods used to estimate excess mortality. A short list of journals is read in full: Eurosurveillance, The Lancet Public Health, The Lancet Healthy Longevity, Nature Aging, Age and Ageing, Demography, Population and Development Review, the European Journal of Population and the International Journal of Epidemiology.
Public health agencies and statistical offices. The World Health Organization's outbreak news, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Dutch RIVM, Denmark's Statens Serum Institut, Japan's National Institute of Infectious Diseases and Ministry of Health, and the UK Health Security Agency, with others added as we learn what each contributes. For population and mortality statistics: Eurostat, the Human Mortality Database and its short-term mortality series, EuroMOMO, the Office for National Statistics, and the statistical offices of the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Korea, Japan, Canada and Australia, together with the United Nations Population Division and the OECD.
Care systems and policy. The International Long-Term Care Policy Network, the OECD's health working papers, Alzheimer's Disease International, and Japan's long-term care insurance reporting.
Sources that publish in German, French or Japanese are read in translation. The full list, with what each source covers and when it last updated, is on the sources page.
We deliberately do not read industry or consultancy publications, including reinsurer bulletins and insurance trade press; general news media; or anything behind a paywall. The first keeps this site from being an insurance publication by another route. The second is because anything worth having appears in a primary source within days. The third keeps every claim here checkable by anyone.
How items are chosen
Each morning a search runs across all of the sources above and turns up somewhere between a hundred and several hundred new papers, reports and releases. Most are not relevant. The candidates are sorted by a language model, which removes duplicates, files each one under an area and a development, and scores its relevance to the questions we follow. That step is done by software because no person could read that volume daily.
Everything after it is done by people. Our COIOS experts read the candidates that pass the threshold, decide which are worth an item, and write each one: what was studied, what was found, and why it is interesting. Nothing appears on this site that they have not written or edited. The model chooses what they read; it does not write what you read.
We say this plainly because readers are entitled to know where automation begins and ends. The scanning software, the standing queries and the source list are described on this page and on the sources page, and any change to them is noted in the corrections and changes log.
Verdicts, status and direction
Each item carries a one-word verdict on what it does to the evidence that came before it:
- new — a question not previously studied at this scale or in this population;
- confirms — consistent with the existing weight of evidence;
- refines — consistent, but changing the size of an effect, the population it applies to, or the mechanism;
- contradicts — inconsistent with the existing weight of evidence.
Each development carries a status — emerging, building, established, contested or fading — and a direction of travel: strengthening, steady, weakening or mixed. These are our reading of the evidence, revised as it changes; the previous readings stay on the page, dated, so the change is visible. Every development also states what would change our view.
Data and trackers
The numbers on this site are official figures reproduced with attribution. Every chart states its source and the date of the data it shows. When a source revises its own past — a re-estimated baseline, a census rebasing, a change in how causes are coded — we record the revision and its size on the revisions page, and any development it affects says so. We do not adjust, smooth or model official figures ourselves.
Corrections
When we get something wrong we correct it in place, with a dated note on the item saying what changed, and record it on the corrections and changes log. If you think an item is wrong, write to hello.central@coios.me with the source; we will look at it and reply.
Independence
The site is funded by COIOS Ltd and by nothing else. It carries no advertising, no sponsored content, and no material from clients or industry bodies. Subscribing is free and always will be.
Everything published here is written in a personal capacity, draws solely on publicly available sources, and represents the views of its authors alone. It is not the view of any employer, client or other organisation, and it is not advice of any kind.