One of the jarring results of the COVID-19 pandemic has been disruption to the rhythm of our daily lives. Routines, regular activities and traditions have all changed as the result of imposed restrictions, personal safety choices and a mixture of both. In the insurance industry, actuaries and other professionals who rely on patterns such as claim reporting lags and loss development factors are now working to understand how emergency declarations, temporary court closures and changes in insured behavior have impacted these patterns. In this blog, I’ll highlight specifically how changes to statutes of limitations because of the COVID-19 pandemic may affect reporting of medical professional liability claims.

As of November 2020, there were 9,279 wildfires in California. These incidents were responsible for 4.2 million acres burned, 31 fatalities and over 10,000 structures damaged or destroyed. According to Cal Fire, significant fire potential remained above normal across Southern California through December. Even before the devastating year, the California Department of Insurance (CDI) was researching the availability and affordability of wildfire coverage. One step in increasing availability was ordering the California FAIR Plan to provide a comprehensive policy in addition to its fire-only coverage by June 1, 2020. 

COVID-19 has been of those rare events that has gotten the entire nation and the entire world to stop and pay attention to it. There have been a few of these events that have occurred in my lifetime, including the September 11 terrorist attacks, the hurricane season of 2004, Hurricane Katrina and the stock market crash of 2008. For me, however, the COVID-19 pandemic is the first crisis I have experienced as a part of the workforce. I sat down with Principal and Consulting Actuary Rob Walling to better understand the impact those earlier, notable and older disasters had on insurance, as well as the potential parallels with COVID-19. Rob has experience working with a wide variety of insurance coverages through all of these periods of time and provides a keen perspective to the effects any of these catastrophes have on the insurance industry.

Joe Herbers, managing principal of Pinnacle Actuarial Resources, has over 35 years of actuarial experience. He has seen major industry changes from asbestos and environmental claims liabilities to the emergence of claims-made policies. He has witnessed the advent of CAT models and the nascence of construction defect claims. For decades, he has seen new problems emerge and the creative solutions that have followed. I sat down with Joe to discuss his perspectives on COVID-19 and how the pandemic may affect younger, current and future actuaries and those others working in today’s insurance industry.

Wildfire season started early and ferociously. According to CAL Fire’s website, as of October 4, over 4 million acres have burned. That is more than 20 times higher than the acres burned in 2019 for the same time period. Five of the top twenty largest wildfires in California have occurred in 2020 and wildfire season is not yet over. Although I’m very lucky to be safe from the fires, there are reminders of the devastation with the dark skies and the falling ash. Checking both the air quality index and pandemic metrics has become my daily habit.