Managing Through the Coronavirus Crisis
COVID-19 or coronavirus, is the sort of extreme challenge that a country has to deal with once in a generation or so. We face challenges to the health of our loved ones, friends and colleagues, unique challenges for our communities, clients and service users and to our own organisations, all at the same time. These are unique and difficult times.
The consequences of this pandemic are clearly of a scale that occurs rarely in a generation. The impact on individuals, groups and society is set to be far reaching. We have an obligation to look after each other as best as we can. We wish you and your groups the very best in coping in these times.
We have produced a brief guide relaying and relying on other published materials to provide some information to policyholders and prospective clients.
By nature, this is generic information, it is not designed to be individual advice and should not be relied on for such purposes. It is also advised that in such a fast moving time, this information may quickly be overtaken by developments and other advice.
There is a lot of information in the public domain concerning how you should respond to coronavirus. This guide is not intended to replicate that and the first section, ‘Planning your Response to Coronavirus’, is short and largely points to external resources.
We shall spend some more time looking at the insurance implications of the current pandemic.
We have a section that considers some of the potential changes to your activities. This could involve employees working from home, scaling back activities or new activities as a consequence of the crisis. How are you risk assessing such activities and what insurance implications are there?
One major consideration there is if you have premises that have recently become unoccupied.
We also take a look at how insurance will respond to the current crisis. Employer liability should continue to offer protection in the event that an employee or volunteer brings an allegation against the group due to a coronavirus related matter.
However, business interruption is a different story. This cover is designed to react when you have an insured event at your premises (fire or flood). Policies are written to meet this design, a local event. Therefore, loss of income from this global pandemic is beyond the scope of policies. We also have a brief look at the smaller extensions, sometimes available to this cover and why Denial of Access or Specific Disease extensions do not provide cover.
Finally, in these challenging times, we wold encourage all of us to look after ourselves. This would include considering your own mental health.
We are living through a crisis that is causing substantial changes to our behaviour. Many of us are essentially quarantined at home, unable to socialise, see friends of loved ones. Many of us are concerned about our communities and we see terrible news stories with escalating numbers of infections and sadly, deaths. We also see a news cycle of empty shelves and people in distress, it is no doubt a time of increased pressure for many of us.
We hope you can find the time to consider the wellbeing of yourself, colleagues and volunteers. If you would like further information in this area, we would highlight the advice and resources at the Mental Health Foundation.
We wish you the very best, to you, your family, communities and your organisations.
Our Covid Guide (updated November 2020)
