Global impact: Hong Kong residents were early mask adopters as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world
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onths of life-changing lockdowns have not suppressed the coronavirus. Second and third waves of the pandemic emerged as restrictions were eased, with the exception of New Zealand, Iceland and a handful of other countries. As laboratories race to find a vaccine, several post-mortems into the worst public health emergency to unfold this century are underway. Predictably there will be many pressing questions but few ready answers. On one aspect, however, there is near universal agreement: the world finally ran out of luck after years of skating on thin ice. For years the medical community has been sounding alarms about the risks of a new super-virus spreading rapidly around this interconnected planet. So has the insurance industry, led by the likes of Swiss Re, which had been looking at the risk for many years, assessing the probable threats infectious diseases would pose. “Pandemics have been part of the risk models of reinsurers and insurers for 20 years,” Bernd Wilke, Zurich-based Senior Risk Manager with Swiss Re, tells Insurance News. “As reinsurers, we know that a pandemic is a major risk for which we must always be prepared.” Swiss Re had warned in its first Sonar report in 2013 of the potential dangers of emerging infectious diseases. The reinsurer returned to the subject two years later, detailing how a global pandemic could affect global
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supply chains and rattle financial markets. “We went back to the theme again, in 2017,” Swiss Re says in a Sonar report in June. “We said the question isn’t whether another deadly infectious disease will appear, but when and how well society is prepared to cope with it. Impact potential is high. “As our Sonar reports to date testify, the warning signs were there. The reach and depth of impact – on economies, financial markets and societies – from the containment measures imposed to halt spread of the virus were probably underestimated.” Technology billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates joined the cause in 2015, warning an infectious virus posed a greater threat to humanity than a nuclear war. A year earlier, then United States President Barack Obama had ominously predicted a pandemic would likely strike in as little as five years. “In order for us to deal with that effectively, we have to put in place an infrastructure – not just here at home, but globally – that allows us to see it quickly, isolate it quickly, respond to it quickly,” Mr Obama said five years ago. “It is a smart investment for us to make. It’s not just insurance… It is knowing that down the road we’re going to continue to have problems like this, particularly in a globalised world where you move from one side of the world to the other in a day.” While no one could have foreseen the chaos and death that would strike when COVID-19 hit the US, he
