While Tower warns weather-related claims will halve their profits, another insurance story is hiding in plain sight: ACC data shows fatal and serious injuries among New Zealand's over-90s collapsed in 2022 and haven't moved since.

In 2020, 28,491 New Zealanders aged 90 and over suffered injuries serious enough to require ACC support. By 2021, that number had climbed to 29,499. Then something changed.

The 2022 figure: 12,597. A 57% drop in a single year. The kind of fall that should have made headlines but didn't.

What happened? COVID-19 lockdowns are the obvious suspect. Older New Zealanders stayed home. Fewer social gatherings meant fewer falls. Fewer hospital visits meant fewer hospital-acquired injuries. Reduced mobility meant reduced risk.

But here's the strange part: the number didn't bounce back. In 2023, fatal and serious injuries among over-90s sat at 12,672. In 2024, 12,225. Three years at roughly half the pre-pandemic level. (Source: Stats NZ / ACC, fatal-serious-injuries)

This isn't a one-year blip. It's a new baseline. Either New Zealand's oldest citizens fundamentally changed how they live after COVID, or something about how we care for them shifted permanently.

The 2024 figure is the lowest in 19 years. You have to go back to 2005 to find comparable numbers. But in 2005, New Zealand had far fewer people over 90. Our population is ageing rapidly, which should push injury numbers up, not down.

So fewer injuries despite more people over 90 suggests real change. Perhaps families became more cautious after seeing how vulnerable older relatives were during the pandemic. Perhaps retirement villages upgraded safety measures. Perhaps the oldest New Zealanders themselves became more risk-averse after two years of being told their age group faced the highest danger.

Or perhaps the explanation is grimmer: the over-90s who were most at risk didn't survive COVID. New Zealand's excess mortality figures show hundreds of additional deaths in 2022 and 2023, concentrated among the elderly.

What we know for certain is this: between 2020 and 2022, the rate of serious injuries among New Zealand's oldest citizens was cut in half. And whatever caused that shift, it's still in effect three years later.

That's 16,000 fewer serious injuries per year compared to pre-pandemic levels. Each one represents an over-90-year-old who didn't fall, didn't break a hip, didn't end up in hospital. Whether that's because we got better at keeping them safe or because the most vulnerable are no longer with us, the data tells the same story: something fundamental changed in 2022, and it hasn't changed back.