## Metadata - Author: [[wired.com]] - Full Title: We Can Protect the Economy From Pandemics. Why Didn't We? - Category: #articles - URL: https://www.wired.com/story/nathan-wolfe-global-economic-fallout-pandemic-insurance/ ## Highlights - Christian Ryan had personal reasons to be struck by the financial consequences of the Zika outbreak. “My father was a hotelier down in Brazil,” said Ryan, the head of Marsh's hospitality, sports, and gaming division. When the disease began spreading in 2016, his dad lost a significant amount of his business and eventually sold the hotel for a fraction of the price he once could have gotten. “It just showed how fragile hospitality was. Because it's predicated on people continuing to show up and feel safe and feel secure.” - As the human and economic devastation multiplied in tandem across the globe, Metabiota's employees suddenly found themselves living inside their own model's projections. Just two years earlier, the company had run a large set of scenarios forecasting the consequences of a novel coronavirus spreading around the globe. “I guess part of what I'm struggling with emotionally is that it's almost like we've been attacked by a cliché,” Oppenheim told me later. “No one can predict the exact timing and location and dynamics, but the broad contours are a story that people have walked through specifically before.” - In a sense, Munich Re had dodged a bullet: Had the company succeeded at selling pandemic protection to corporate giants starting 19 months before, it would have collected almost no premiums and now be paying out on every single one. Kraut acknowledged as much, but offered that if insurers never pay out, “then you lose the reason of existence.” - After all, I'd written about him more than a decade before. I had heard the warnings directly from him, listened to him describe the hundreds of thousands of unknown mammalian viruses that lurked out in the biosphere. I'd hiked through the jungles where HIV likely made its jump to humans. And then I'd come home, written my story, and largely forgotten about the pandemic he'd predicted. - “The demand for insurance arises at particular moments, often in response to dramatic crises that demonstrate human vulnerability,” the Princeton historian Harold James has written. In 1666, after the Great Fire of London destroyed a third of the city, the modern fire insurance business was born. A financial crisis in the 1830s prompted the development of the US life insurance market. In 1906, the San Francisco earthquake became the greatest payout, relative to premiums, in Munich Re's history and reshaped natural disaster preparedness forever. Hurricane Andrew, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11: Each has shifted how our society thinks about risk and the money we set aside to try to prepare for it. Climate change is doing so again - several prominent US restaurants have sued to try to force the issuers of their current business interruption policies to cover coronavirus losses. (Where policies don't specifically include or exclude disease, insurers have just denied any Covid-related claims from small businesses, leaving them with no relief.) - It is not impossible that over the course of the next 50 years, humanity has an event which is substantially worse than this event, and people at that point look back and say, ‘As terrible as Covid-19 was, if we had not had it, the consequences would have been so much more dramatic.'” Even amid the pandemic he had predicted, Wolfe said he still considered himself an optimist. “You want to honor the devastation that this virus is going to have on families, on livelihoods. But in the grand scheme of history, it may also be seen as a very costly inoculum against future events. I believe that the world has no choice but to respond in such a forceful way that will make humanity safer.”