18/03/2021 - No infectious disease outbreak in at least 100 years has caused such broad and devastating impacts on the global economy as COVID-19. This has affected businesses across the world, revealing that many are not protected against pandemic risk.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), with support from Marsh McLennan, is bringing together insurance industry, government and business leaders for a two-day virtual Conference on Addressing the Protection Gap for Pandemic Risk, on 23-24 March 2021.

This event will shed light on the ways the COVID-19 pandemic has affected businesses across the world—and the important steps needed to better cover pandemic risk and build capacity to cover it in the future.  

Speakers will include Angel Gurria, OECD Secretary-General, U.S. Congressman Emanuel Cleaver II and French MEP Stéphanie Yon-Courtin, among others, who will discuss the economic impact of COVID-19 and how public-private partnerships can address the protection gap for pandemic risk.

”Governments will need to carefully consider the best approach to addressing this type of risk in the future – whether to take on the whole universe of liabilities or try to share some of the risk with the insurance sector.” said Greg Medcraft, Director of Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs at the OECD. “If insurers are not willing to put a meaningful amount of capital at risk they will likely be left out of any eventual solution with all the reputational implications that that would entail” he adds.

The magnitude of potential losses and high levels of correlation make pandemic risk challenging to insure. The OECD estimates that one month of strict confinement measures resulted in approximately USD 1.7 trillion in lost business revenues. Levels of potential coverage for pandemic risk vary by country, but are limited for non-physical damage business interruption (BI) losses. 

 

Find out more about this event and register to participate here.