Technology providers in the insurance industry have rallied with solutions to alleviate the Covid-19 pandemic. AIR Worldwide came out with one of the most useful ones when it launched a multi-pronged product to help insurers tackle the mortality impact.
In April 2020, Verisk with its analytics arm, AIR Worldwide, launched its Covid-19 Projection Tool, an interactive software powered by AIR's pandemic modelling capabilities, that provided Covid-19 case and death projections worldwide in four-week increments, with daily updates to project one day further into the future.
The modelled projections of the pandemic are available globally at a country level and the outputs consider variations in data availability and reliability, including underreporting. It was an invaluable resource for insurers to understand the spread of the disease and efficacy of containment measures.
"We provided this complimentary tool to give communities, businesses, governments, and insurers a better understanding of what the near future of the Covid-19 pandemic could have looked like," says Doug Fullam, director of life/health modelling at AIR Worldwide. "The information was made publicly available as we felt it was imperative to leverage our strengths as a trusted data steward to provide services that benefit the greater good."
AIR also pushed innovation to deal with the litigation that has resulted from the pandemic lockdown. The Arium scenario-based loss assessment framework allows risk managers to quantify potential product liability in industries with heavily impacted supply chains such as auto, semiconductors, and retail. It can also be used to deal with the increased frequency of financial events, such as bankruptcies due to the business interruption impacts of coronavirus and medical malpractice lawsuits related to Covid.
Moving forward into 2021, Verisk and AIR have developed preliminary simulations that may assist in projecting feasible outcomes of vaccine implementation using advanced mathematical and epidemiological modelling.