Swine Flu: Do You Have the Right Insurance Plan?
You could have been forgiven for not taking swine flu seriously at first, after all we’ve previously had the threats of horse flu and bird flu which had little impact.
But after 16 UK deaths and the admission by the authorities that they have stopped counting how many people are infected (the current estimate is 10,000 cases), it’s clear that we are going beyond the point of arranging a few ’swine flu parties’.
The numbers are alarming. A month ago the global estimate of swine flu sufferers was 10,000. Such is the speed at which the H1N1 virus is spreading one forecast says the UK could see 100,000 people infected per day by the end of August.
With the prospect of millions of people having to take time off it is clear that businesses need to have small business insurance contingency plans.
Unfortunately, the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Dr Margaret Chan, says the UK will not have a vaccine widely available by the end of August, as the government has said. Clinical trials will delay this by a couple of months, she told the Guardian today.
In 2006 the tripartite authorities undertook a six-week market wide exercise with 70 organisations and 3,000 staff to see if the financial services sector could cope with a pandemic flu outbreak. All the FSA knows is that flows of cash, payment systems and retail banking will definitely be affected and that the banks and big businesses may have to run with skeleton staff.
The one, possibly helpful, bit of information to come out of the exercise was to do with insurance.
Although the regulator couldn’t predict how many insurance claims there would be, Swiss Re estimated in 2004 that a pandemic with a level of severity expected once every 200 years would cause excess mortality of between one and one 1.5 deaths per 1000 lives with an insurance portfolio.
However, on the commercial insurance side the report warned that disruption caused by pandemic flu is unlikely to be covered under most business interruption policies.
So, are you covered and can your business cope with the swine flu outbreak?
Let us know what precautions have you taken against swine flu and what questions you are asking the companies you deal with, whether it be life companies, fund managers or IT providers.
