Pilot Growth News

COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic in our deeply interconnected world, and sadly it won’t be the worst. Two profoundly different possible futures are available to us: one in which we stick our heads in the sand as we have consistently done, and one where humanity takes the hard, necessary steps to protect itself.

Metabiota on CNN Business. It’s too late for this pandemic. But everyone wants insurance against the next one.

Businesses around the world are facing catastrophic losses as the novel coronavirus forces them to scale back operations or shut down entirely, and most don’t have insurance cover for pandemics. Companies are now racing to buy protection against the next outbreak, insurance experts say.

It was an AI that first saw it coming, or so the story goes. On December 30, an artificial-intelligence company called BlueDot, which uses machine learning to monitor outbreaks of infectious diseases around the world, alerted clients—including various governments, hospitals, and businesses—to …

Companies buy insurance that usually pays out when they have to halt operations. But it’s usually because of physical damage, not outbreaks.   Two years ago Munich Re, the reinsurance giant, tried to start underwriting a new kind of insurance …

Metabiota’s Chairman, Nathan Wolfe, featured on CNN with Anderson Cooper Epidemics can spread globally faster now than before — but our science has also advanced There have been epidemics in decades past, and there will be more in future years. …

The epidemic-monitoring company Metabiota determined that Thailand, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan had the highest risk of seeing the virus show up more than a week before cases in those countries were actually reported, partially by looking to flight data. Metabiota uses natural-language processing to evaluate online reports about a potential disease, and it’s also working on developing the same technology for social media data.