(no subject)

[brin_bellway]

I wanted to title this "And hoped by stretching tall that they might keep their land/Their home, their hearth, their flesh and soul", but it doesn't quite fit in the title box.

[cw: illness]


My law textbook: In the 1890s, England was plagued by two related phenomena: an influenza epidemic and quack medicine.

Me: uh, yeah, about that...

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We're still standing in a hole, but *wow* is it a lot shallower than it used to be.

(God, can you imagine? Not knowing anything about what you're up against--not even being sure if it's *contagious* or not--just you and your phenol against a mysterious and hostile world. *shudders*)

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(Yes, I know it's by no means certain that the 1889 pandemic was a coronavirus, but honestly that adds to the point. If 1889 researchers had had the ability to *tell us* what kind of pathogen it was, we wouldn't have to wonder now.)

Comments

[brin_bellway]

>>... I will admit my brain immediately went "so this is basically just pandemic insurance then, neat".

Huh, that's an interesting point.

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>>I bet they had other barriers in the way of getting payouts (not like insurance doesn't)

I guess the problem with infectious-disease insurance is that all of the insurance company's bets are correlated with each other: during a pandemic a large percentage of its policies all try to claim at roughly the same time and it goes bankrupt. That gives it extra incentive to try to wriggle out of things, plus to an extent there'd be the usual disability-insurance problem of "the time you most need the money is the time you are least capable of jumping through bureaucratic hoops".

Overall I think it's probably better in many modern cases to hold pandemic insurance in the form of physical objects that will be more useful to own when a pandemic hits, like stocks of canned goods and soap and air filters: much harder for an insurance company to wriggle out of that. But if you move around a lot, or have financial/psychological trouble maintaining stockpiles of even guaranteed-useful assets (you can always use the soap for regular handwashing), or you're a native of the 1890s and are so bewildered by what's going on that you can't really do much of anything to prevent it from hitting you, I can see the appeal of a more flexible money-based policy.

[contrarianarchon]

>>I guess the problem with infectious-disease insurance is that all of the insurance company's bets are correlated with each other

Oof, yes, that'd sink the business model wouldn't it.

(Pandemic insurance company that spends most of it's profits on insurance against bankruptcy, etc, and thus sinks that cost into a wider network of insurance systems?)