Familiar circumstances require vigilance, resilience

The circumstances are all too familiar: a mutating virus that can spread from animals to humans, a threat amplified by a globalised world, has created what experts say is a public health emergency of international concern.

On 14th August, the World Health Organization (WHO) sounded its highest level of alarm under international health law, after the emergence of what many experts consider a more dangerous, more infectious variant of mpox passing from person to person.

Only two years ago, while much of the world was still grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic, a previous mpox outbreak – then referred to as monkeypox – spread from endemic regions to Europe and North America. At the time, the WHO called this the first instance that mpox had been reported concurrently in endemic and non-endemic countries.

In recent weeks, mpox cases have again surged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and are spreading in a growing number of African countries, causing hundreds of deaths so far this year. At least one case has been detected in Europe in a person who had travelled to Africa, as well as several cases that have been detected in Asia.

Mpox has seen a resurgence, and so has anxiety that a potentially deadly disease that can become more dangerous and infectious as it mutates could spread globally, despite our efforts to stop it. This is a challenge that spans continents, and it should have all our attention.

As was the case in 2022, we don't anticipate a significant financial impact on the global insurance system from this latest mpox outbreak, at least for now. Vaccinations are already developed. Although there is some respiratory transmission, it mainly requires close contact with the skin or mucous membranes of an infected person to spread, making it easier to contain than many other viruses.

Even so, the WHO's emergency declaration is a strong reminder that every country must have robust surveillance systems in place to track the emergence and spread of infectious diseases. Under the right circumstances, as we witnessed in 2020, an outbreak could quickly grow to levels that pose challenges to every nation across the globe.

At Swiss Re, we take the spread of disease very seriously. We have to. Our Life & Health Reinsurance Business Unit absorbed USD 3.5 billion in COVID-related mortality claims between 2020 and 2022, helping families who lost loved ones.

But even before that, the 2003 SARS outbreak in Asia was a watershed event for pandemic modelling and insurance. It led Swiss Re to develop its first probabilistic pandemic model to calculate losses from different disease scenarios. As an industry, we took SARS as an opportunity to develop an understanding of pandemic risk in our books, and to stress test the insurance portfolios that we support with our reinsurance.  

Now, after the hard-won experience of COVID-19, our underwriters and actuaries have taken volumes of new data and insights generated by this real-life test to expand our understanding of how events like these impact our portfolios.

This knowledge flows into our day-to-day business. In Swiss Re's case, disease and model updates to Life Guide, our underwriting manual, help underwriters around the world to leverage our risk knowledge in their assessment processes.

A resurgent mpox virus is again a chance for all of us to revisit and accelerate our understanding of disease outbreaks. It's also an opportunity for a reality check, prompting us to re-assess our thinking on pandemics and ask ourselves hard questions about whether we are prepared or if society again risks becoming complacent.

The world is grappling with numerous challenges now, from armed conflicts and geopolitical turmoil to uncertainty over the economy's trajectory. These began before the pandemic ended, potentially interfering with a complete reckoning with the consequences of COVID. Even so, we can't allow our disease preparedness efforts to be distracted.

While insurance is there to support families when loved ones pass away, prevention and saving lives should always be the priority. Unfortunately, the mpox outbreak in central Africa yet again brings into focus the persistent challenges in delivering adequate healthcare to some of the world's most vulnerable populations.

There are reports of insufficient vaccines in affected African countries, leaving at-risk individuals with less protection. Shortages like this, whether the result of approval processes or production capacity, raise concerns similar to those emerged during the pandemic about equal access to potentially life-saving medical supplies. Even as we acknowledge the complexity that surrounds this issue, it's clear that improvements on this front are still necessary.

The WHO's declaration of a global mpox emergency sends a clear message that our work in readying ourselves for the next public health crises – one that can emerge from any corner of the planet, at any moment – is far from over. For governments and the private sector, it’s a call for cooperation, within and across borders.

And for insurers and reinsurers, it is a powerful impulse reminding us to stay vigilant, monitor emerging trends, model potential impacts on in-force portfolios, and engage with our partners to share risk insights.