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COVID-19 response ‘could bankrupt the insurance industry’: insurance defense lawyer

The problem for policyholders is that they’re required to show physical loss or damages to make a claim for business interruption. Typically, he said, insurers will pay out business interruption insurance if, for instance, a company has to shut down because of a fire or a natural disaster. Civil authority provisions cover shutdowns mandated by state or local governments in response to nearby disasters, such as a business that’s ordered to close its doors because of a chemical release at a manufacturing plant down the street, Badger said.

COVID-19 shutdowns, he said, don’t fit either of those scenarios. Policyholders whose businesses were closed because COVID-19 molecules were found on their premises may argue that the virus constituted physical damage. That will be a question for courts to decide, Badger said. But widespread shutdowns of uninfected businesses, in order to slow the spread of the virus, cannot trigger business interruption or civil authority coverage.

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Cyber Security&Covid-19

If you have effective cyber incident response, crisis management and/or business recovery plans in place, it is important to review them in light of your new operating environment. Can you access all the equipment you will need to test or reset? Is your data still being backed up to a secure site? Can your users still effectively report phishing or other indicators of cyber incidents? How are you going to maintain communication between the key crisis managers if all your laptops and mobiles get encrypted with ransomware? If your plan isn’t tested yet, now may be the wrong time to start – but at a minimum do all the relevant staff at least have a clear understanding of the plan, and how your current situation has altered it?

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Climate-change effects to drive rising losses from severe weather events:Sigma study

Worldwide, economic losses from natural and man-made disasters in 2019 were USD 146 billion, lower than USD 176 billion in 2018 and the previous 10-year annual average of USD 212 billion. The global insurance industry covered USD 60 billion of the losses, compared with USD 93 billion in 2018 and USD 75 billion on average in the previous 10 years.

“To uphold the insurance risk transfer model as a powerful tool to foster resilience, insurers need to adapt before, not post events,” Martin Bertogg, Head of Catastrophe Perils at Swiss Re said. “To this end, insurers should be wary of historical loss records in understanding today’s state of the socio-economic environment and climate. Averaging out over a past spanning multiple decades can lead to distorted risk assessment.”

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Caronavirus Pandemic: After the virus, what world will we live in?

“The potential for widespread social unrest in countries that have not provided a social safety net for those losing their jobs during this crisis strikes me as very real, with possible repercussions for governance and more” said Joshua Geltzer, visiting professor of law at Georgetown University.
Countries like Russia and Turkey, led by the same strongmen for two decades, will be hoping that their measures will be enough to spare them the worst of the virus and any political consequences.

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Coronavirus drives patients to online doctors, spurring telemedicine sector

As COVID-19 spreads across Europe, leaving new patients in its wake, the fear of infection and a saturated health-care system are driving large numbers of people online for medical consultations. Startups like General Atlantic-backed Doctolib and insurer AXA SA-supported Qare in France, Swedish Kry International AB’s unit Livi, the UK’s Push Doctor and Germany’s Compugroup Medical SE that offer up virtual doctors are raking it in.

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What if you can’t afford to fight Coronavirus?

Nearly three-quarters of all deaths from infectious disease in 2016 happened in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia. While just 5% of Europeans die from infections, the rate in Africa is more than 40%.(2) Conditions such as HIV, diarrhea and malaria have seen precipitous declines south of the Sahara in recent years, but diseases of the nose, throat and lungs like influenza remain far more prevalent. After cardiovascular and neonatal conditions, respiratory infections are now the leading cause of death in Africa.

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Climate Risk:Singapore prepares itself with $72B Defense Plan

The idea is to make sure each generation contributes a fair share, without burdening future generations, said a spokesperson from the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources. With no hinterland to retreat to, Singapore has no choice but to invest long term to meet the impacts of climate change, the spokesperson said.

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