COVID-19 has prompted businesses to contemplate the type of
protection their insurance policies may offer them in this time of
uncertainty. Perhaps your business has had to close, and you can no
longer pay rent. Perhaps you failed to take steps to protect
employees or customers from the virus, and now they are threatening
legal action against you. On the other side of the equation,
insurers may see an influx of claims dealing with losses associated
with COVID-19, and they will need to be determined what losses, if
any, the insurer is obligated to cover.
Whether an insurer will cover losses will ultimately come down
to whether losses suffered during the pandemic are losses caused by
a "covered peril" that are not otherwise excluded under
the policy. Some policies are "all risk" policies, which
offer a broad range of coverage, whereas other insurance policies
may only cover those perils named in the policy. Commercial
insurance policies typically contain two streams of
