COVID-19 Education and Research Resources

The COVID-19 pandemic impacts all walks of life, including the insurance and risk management industry, education, and research. There are many ways in which actuarial practitioners, educators and researchers contribute to the development of public knowledge and actuarial techniques for pandemic risks. There are lots of great actuarial research and educational resources that are produced independently by individuals and groups in our community. This page serves as a platform for independent educators, researchers, and groups to disseminate and promote their work. If you are interested in contributing to this resource repository, please also consider submitting your education and/or research work on this web form.

The Society of Actuaries and the Education and Research council does not endorse any material posted on the webpage. 

North America’s Demand and Supply of Medical Resources

This website is built based on the paper Pandemic risk management: resources contingency planning and allocation. It implements the models described in the paper with real data to showcase the optimal contingency planning and resource allocation strategies that balance spatio-temporal competitions of medical supply and demand.

Pandemic risk management: resources contingency planning and allocation

In the COVID-19 pandemic, extraordinary shortages of medical resources have been observed in many parts of the world. To address this issue, this paper introduces new strategies for optimal stockpiling and allocation that balance spatio-temporal competitions of medical supply and demand.

B.1.1.7: How to Avoid a Snowball Effect?

In this educational note, we explain how new more transferable variants of the Covid-19 virus can easily become the predominant in populations, leading to a snowball of new infections.

SIR Model with Stochastic Transmission

Extending the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model, the cornerstone of epidemiological models, this paper introduces nonlinear stochastic SIR model. This allows for comparing the relative magnitudes of the epidemiological and demographic uncertainties and how they evolve during the progression of the epidemic.

Actuarial Applications of Epidemiological Models

Most actuarial literature focuses on trend analysis, frequency and severity. This paper builds a bridge between epidemiological and actuarial modeling and sets up an epidemic which provides financial arrangements to cover the expenses resulting from medical treatments of infectious diseases.

Epidemic Risk and Insurance Coverage

The paper applies simple actuarial methods to build an insurance plan protecting against an epidemic risk in a population. Using martingale arguments, a method by recursion is developed to calculate the cost components and the corresponding premium levels in this extended epidemic model.

Two "Once-in-100-Year" Crises in Twelve Years - Are Channels for Financial Contagion Still the Same?

The rapid outbreak of COVID-19 and the subsequent rapid spread of financial crisis in 2020 strikingly highlight the similarity between the virus spread in population and the financial crisis spread across countries. This study provides an in-depth understanding of financial contagion mechanism, and the dynamics of transmission channels cross 22 major stock markets.

COVID-19 Pandemic Control: Balancing Detection Policy and Lockdown Intervention Under IDU Sustainability

This study proposes an extended SIR model which captures several features of the recent COVID-19 outbreak and integrates an intensive care unit (ICU) capacity. The proposed model enables a tractable quantitative analysis of the optimal policy for the control of the epidemic dynamics using both lockdown and detection intervention levers.

Wearing a Face Mask: The New Dress Code?

This educational note illustrates the effect of convexity related to policies that decrease the reproduction number of a pandemic disease, especially the wear-a-mask policy. It demonstrates that any strategy changing the likelihood of one person infecting another has an exponential effect and that a small decrease in the reproduction number may imply a huge decrease in deaths after a number of infection rounds.

First Quarter Chronicle of COVID-19: An Attempt to Measure Governments’ Responses

This article presents a first quarter chronicle of COVID-19 in Hubei China, Italy and Spain, particularly focusing on infection speed, death and fatality rates. It illustrated the pandemic’s evolution in relation to government measures by analyzing the parameters of the best fitting distributions of the available data for the three rates in each of the three regions.