People

Movie theaters, gyms, hotels and golf courses have been forced to close temporarily. Long-standing sporting events, such as the NCAA basketball tournament, the Masters golf tournament, the Kentucky Derby and the Olympics, have been canceled or significantly postponed. Broadway has gone dark, theme parks such as Disney World have shuttered, and musical performers have called off their tours. The economic implications of such closures and cancellations is likely to be staggering. It is thus anticipated that an increasing number of businesses will look to their insurance policies to mitigate their losses. 

Does biomedical engineering have a potential role in the insurance industry when it comes to gauging the cause of injuries? 

I was several months postpartum with my first child when I took on my first freelance writing assignment for Business Insurance magazine in 2007, after leaving my post as a staff writer to change diapers — “maternity left,” I called it.

As the March issue of Business Insurance goes to press, the coronavirus outbreak continues to spread to new countries, with growing numbers sick from the virus and a global death toll that is also rising. While the majority of the cases are in China, where the virus originated, countries including South Korea, Japan, Italy, Singapore, Iran, the United Kingdom and the United States have reported confirmed cases, and varying internal responses are in place from quarantines to travel restrictions and lockdowns.

When states started lifting COVID-19 lockdown restrictions last month, people who had been working from home through the crisis began preparing to head back to their workplaces, in many cases rather reluctantly.

How to plug the talent gap in any industry is a perennial question, but the question asked of this year’s Break Out Award winners “What should the industry do to attract more young people to work in it?” is perhaps more pertinent. 

First and foremost, many people in the industry had friends and colleagues who were trapped in the Twin Towers on 9/11 and did not make it out. The hundreds of insurance industry professionals that died in the attacks remain fixed in many people’s memories and continue to be memorialized by their companies.