SARS, which infected 8,000 people mostly in Asia and is now seen as foreshadowing the current pandemic, led to millions of dollars in business-interruption insurance claims. Among the claims was a $16 million payout to one hotel chain, Mandarin Oriental International.
As a result, many insurers added exclusions to standard commercial policies for losses caused by viruses or bacteria. Now, the added policy language will potentially allow insurance companies to avoid hundreds of billions of dollars in business-interruption claims because of the covid-19 pandemic.
Insurers realized they would not be able to cover such a broad-scale event,” said Robert Gordon, a senior vice president at the American Property Casualty Insurance Association.
Other types of insurance policies may still have to pay out. Personal travel and event cancellation policies are expected to face huge claims from the coronavirus pandemic, according to industry reports. But few successful claims are expected to come from traditional business insurance lines because of the exclusion of virus-related damages.
The insurance industry said that its policies are tightly regulated by state authorities and that the exclusions were necessary given the overwhelming number of claims that can come from a single disease outbreak.
“This is a scale that only the federal government can bridge,” said David Sampson, president of the insurance trade group.