Health care providers may prioritize patients without underlying conditions who are likeliest to make a full recovery, but there’s no national standard for triage. The question of withholding or withdrawing ventilators from the sickest patients is so charged that medical experts have encouraged providers to develop their own guidelines. Like the U.S. pandemic response itself, it’s largely a state-by-state and, to some extent, hospital-by-hospital patchwork.

While many classes of insurance, such as business interruption and event cancellation, exclude epidemics, D&O insurance usually provides cover and brokers said this could be a rare avenue for companies to recoup costs triggered by the pandemic.

The United States had the most confirmed cases of any country, more than 240,000, the data showed.Since the virus was first recorded in China late last year, the pandemic has spread around the world, prompting governments to close businesses, ground airlines and order hundreds of millions of people to stay at home to try to slow the contagion.