“Overall the insurance industry has handled this well because it entered the crisis with lots of capital. So it knew about the risk,” Chief Executive Christian Mumenthaler told a Bloomberg financial conference.

Many market players hedged early, he said, figuring the COVID-19 respiratory disease would spread around the world after first being identified in Wuhan, China, late last year.

“And then the overall loss as we can see it now – between $50 billion and $80 billion – is manageable for the insurance industry. You compare that to more than $140 billion in 2017 in terms of nat cat (natural disaster) losses,” he said.

The expense of deploying the Pfizer shot will likely heighten existing fears that wealthier nations will get the best vaccines first, despite a World Health Organization-backed effort called Covax that aims to raise $18 billion to purchase vaccines for poorer countries.
“The requirement for extremely cold temperatures is likely to cause spoilage of a lot of vaccine,” said Michael Kinch, a vaccine specialist at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Today is a great day for science and humanity,” said Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla, noting the data milestone comes with “infection rates setting new records, hospitals nearing over-capacity and economies struggling to reopen.”

Alexander Gintsburg, director of the Gamaleya Institute which developed the vaccine, said the interim results demonstrated that Sputnik V was effective and mass vaccinations would be rolled out in Russia in the coming weeks.

“The government is not prepared to handle the catastrophic situation. There are no community based isolation centres and ICU beds are limited,” said Aayas Luintel, a doctor who has been treating coronavirus patients in Patan Hospital near Kathmandu.

Santa Kumar Das, of the Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital, in Kathmandu, said medics were seeing more severe cases of community transmission after relatively mild cases from outside previously.