All sim households disappeared

Same issue here it just seems that the update broke the sim household loader for most of us.
We can load in to our saves just fine. (they are visible)
We can load our households just fine. (they are no longer visible on the map once clicking on their house)
Once in to the house hold the bottom UI bar is lowered and stretched out beyond your view.
At first i thought it was because i play in windowed mode but that is not the case.
(For some odd reason the game just loads better in windowed mode then fullscreen)

There seems to be some simshousehold load in error going on due to the Grim Reaper event integration.
Because the sims do not get loaded in, you can not interact with anything and simply load in an empty household.
Mods really do not affect this as even newly generated households with a cleanly reinstalled game/EA launcher does not resolve this. I have a few nephews who are not to happy that their little buddies no longer exist.

I've had a different issue with the previous event as well.
On a new PC with newly installed sims does not give you the reward items/traits etc.
Which left me to simply mod them in as a work around.

So do i just stop playing the sims every time there is an event to save guard my sims housholds from harm and then simply mod in the items afterwards ?
Because these events seem to have very little if any at all debugging before going live and are not retained by your account once you upgrade to a new PC.
I assume it gets retained if you upload your households but why not to your account instead?