With no vaccine or treatment yet developed, there is a lot of ‘guesstimating’ that the COVID-19 coronavirus may be around for at least another year, but more likely two, and that people and systems will have to adjust.
That includes the insurance market, where the absence of business continuity insurance, or BCI, as offset to some of the economic costs of business lost to the shutdown sparked by the pandemic has been a key talking point – and it’s mostly been critical.
The solution under contemplation is a collaboration with the Government on how to make BCI not only available, but also affordable for insurers to sell and businesses to buy.
No company holds that type of insurance now, which means that in this first stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, whose disruption to businesses and the economy is being counted in the billions – at the projected 5.3 per cent contraction in economic output measured in GDP that’s about $117 billion – general insurers themselves have no claims to deal with, and therefore no direct risk exposure.
For some, this means they are failing to meet the moment.
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