| | FEBRUARY 202119experience. It is a tricky problem indeed. How much of claims you will have in the next quarter, depends so much on the extent of a potential COVID-19 flare up in the areas where your customer base is concentrated. In fact, super-spreader events have been so unpredictable that it is almost impossible to know whether one metro city is going to be better or worse than the other in a week from now. As actuaries, we are not only redesigning health and life products to include COVID and related comorbidities, we are also resorting to remarkable amount of data crunching as well as lot of out-of-the-box thinking to make the products both profitable and affordable to the customers.I was rambling on, and not surprisingly, she was suddenly sleepy; so, we hung up. But my worries have been regularly keeping me up till late. Remember, a life insurance plan is unique from the risk perspective since it is a long-term contract. We not only have to assess a plausible premium structure but must also determine how to ensure long term returns to the customers, given the extreme volatility and uncertainty in the financial market. India's GDP has shrunk over 24 percent this quarter. Different economists are theorising differently how it will be the next quarter. As such, the assumptions we make today can end up creating severe strains on the insurer's finances in not so distant future. One must also not forget the reinsurers who absorb huge exposures. Their financial viability can make or break the entire insurance industry. Spurred by the crises, reinsurers too are implementing new ways of risk sharing like stop loss arrangements and financial reinsurance. It is
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