As Thomas L. Ryan, Service Corporation’s chairman and chief executive, told investors Wednesday morning:
If you go back in this industry and particularly with SCI, year-to-year you would see the numbers of deaths -- probably in one year you may be down 1% or 2%, in the next year you're up 1% or 2% which you could predict was pretty good accuracy over a year and over a big footprint like ours what was probably going to happen… 2020 comes along, Covid, game-changer, right. We're having to do at one point of time 20 percent more funerals which is unheard of in a year versus, let's say, a year or two before.
So Service Corporation expected that once Covid passed, its business would go back to normal…
What we would have expected is, why wouldn't we go back towards, let's say, a 2019 level, maybe you get a percent or so growth of 2019, I would expect that. So that would be a reasonable level that we think would stabilize. And that's kind of what we anticipated...
Only that’s not what has happened.
What we're telling you is, the third quarter of this year, we did 15% more calls than we did in the third quarter of 2019. That is not what anybody would have anticipated and that has just a very de minimis amount of Covid deaths [emphasis added] in it.
Alex Berenson commentary:
Covid is gone. But people keep dying. Why?
Unsurprisingly, Ryan did not mention mRNA vaccines anywhere. Why would he? Doing so would only make for headaches he and Service Corporation do not need.
But, earlier in the call, he did point to “more cancer deaths” and more broadly a decline in overall health:
"We believe these excess services are more permanent in nature ...
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