With the insurance industry facing collapse, it’s important to extend their concept of ‘pooled risk’, to…

With the insurance industry facing collapse, it’s important to extend their concept of ‘pooled risk’, to Covid. Pooled risk means distributing risk. The exact opposite of what we’re doing for Covid. /1 https://t.co/W76Ixzb75c

With Covid, our ‘living with the virus’ is dumping ALL of the risk onto the highest risk groups. While allowing the majority to do nothing at all to mitigate risk. /2

Even the idea of ‘focused protection’ is not the pooling of risk. (And there is no protection anyway, it’s a slogan.) Focused protection again allocates all of the risk management to highest risk groups, and zero to everybody else. /3

To pool risk for Covid would mean to accept that catastrophic outcomes from Covid could happen to anybody. As with insurance, nobody knows in advance who ‘the vulnerable’ will end up being. We ALL try to insure our cars and houses, for example. /4

Because any of us could lose them, to fire, flood or accident etc. You don’t pre-determine *where* the highest risk lies, because mostly you can’t. So you pool the risk. Everybody accepts some of the burden. /5

Knowing that only a few will be catastrophically impacted. And when they are, the pooled risk looks after them. We should ‘insure’ against Covid by all mitigating spread, for example. The costs of that are then pooled. /6

So everybody pays some cost. But those who might be catastrophically affected then have a much lower risk. Because we pooled the risk. /7

None of this is oppression or impinging upon peoples’ freedom. It’s insurance, a key plank of economic life. /end