This is Mike Morneau. I'm with Learning Times. I'll be your technical producer, and it's a pleasure to be here with you today. Before we get the webcast underway, I would like to just draw your attention to the lower left of your screen where you'll find a chat window. In the event that you require any technical support, please communicate with me directly using the chat window, and I'll respond as quickly as I can to try to resolve any issues you may have. You can also email me at mikeathelearningtimes.com for additional support. And so without further delay, we'll go ahead and I will turn things over to our host, Robin Bauer-Kilgo with FDIC. Go ahead, Robin. Hi, everyone, and welcome to today's CDC CARES webinar. Our topic today is insurance, how to manage your organization's risks. We're going to start with a couple quick slides talking about the program and what we're going to be covering today, and I'm going to hand the mic over to our speaker. So let's start off with me. My name is Robin Bauer-Kilgo. I am the new Community Coordinator for CDC CARES. I'm happy to join you all and be here today. And we just heard from Mike, who is our Senior Producer over at Learning Time. Some recent news with CDC CARES is that we now have a dozen of our past webinars have Spanish subtitles. These webinars can be found in our archives and are indicated by a hot button at the end. You can actually find them by using Espanol or Spanish as a keyword in the search functions. And when you click on them, you will be able to follow along on the webinar in Spanish subtitles. So we're pretty excited by this, and we just added a few more to the catalog which should be updated sometime next week. So in future news, you can go ahead and keep up with our offerings on Facebook at the CDC community. Follow us on Twitter at CDC CARES. And we do care for your clock. So if you want to join us for that one, go to our website, and you can sign up for that webinar. As always, if you have any questions concerning the care of your collections, we have our Connecting to Collections Care Community. That can be found at the link found on the screen. There's also instructions on joining the community at the following website, as you can see. And the forum is a really nice place because we actually have conservator monitors that can provide reliable help and guidance quickly. So it's a great community if you want to have a question in an area to have someone take a look and give you some great advice. As Mike mentioned, this is a new platform for everyone. We hope everyone is enjoying it. If you have any questions concerning the platform, please do let us know. You can email us at c2cc at culturalheritage.org. And I just included a quick slide showing kind of where the chat box is on your screen. You do need to click on that Send button, at least on my browser to do it. The return key doesn't seem to work for me. But if you click Send, we will take a look at it. There is going to be a Q&A period at the end of the webinar. So you can go ahead and put your questions in the chat box as we go, or wait till the end. I will be monitoring it the entire time. So feel free to throw a question in there while the webinar is happening. And lastly, we're going to go ahead and roll into what the webinar is today. As we said it was insurance, how to manage your organization's risk. Our speaker today is Kevin Sullivan. He is the client executive for the National Trust Insurance. Kevin oversees client servicing for National Trust Insurance, a subsidiary, as I said, of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He assists the owners and stewards of historic structures with their insurance procurement and helps advise clients as to the proper policies to carry. And without further ado, I'm going to hand the mic over to Kevin. Hi everyone. Nice to be with you today. Thanks for taking the time to be with me. I'm hopeful to make the topic of insurance somewhat interesting. It can be a tall task sometimes, but hopefully we'll use some real-world scenarios to try to paint a better picture so that you can understand what we're talking about. And let's just move along. So as Robin mentioned, today's topic is insurance. And when you talk about insurance, what you're really talking about is risk management. So we're going to get into topics of risk management, how to best put your organization on good footing from a risk standpoint. Robin pretty well covered this, but I'm with National Trust Insurance. We're the for-profit subsidiary of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. We were created in 2003 out of a need of their membership. Their membership was made up of historic homeowners and historic both societies and preservation organizations. They were having a really difficult time finding and procuring proper insurance. And we were developed to essentially be a specialized insurance agent. So that's what we do. We work with a few thousand clients nationally placing their insurance, and it can be all types of insurance from the property insurance to their fine arts and liability insurance and all various things. We work in every state, and our ultimate mission is to really educate and inform the owners and stewards of historic structures as to how to best protect their organization's biggest assets, which is sometimes the building itself or the collection that lies within. So the topic of risk management is very broad, and a lot of people define it in different ways. In our context, risk management is the practice of identifying and analyzing loss exposures and then taking the steps to minimize the financial impact that they could pose. So what that means is you as an organization are trying to decide to do something. You're hosting an event, and a board member throws out the idea of, hey, let's serve alcohol at the event. So the practice of risk management is identifying, taking that decision and running it through your processes so that the outcomes of that decision don't financially impact your organization. So using that example, do we want to have alcohol at an event? There's a few different ways to take on risk management. The first one is to avoid it. So you say, all right, we don't have alcohol, then we're not going to have any alcohol-related claims, simple enough, but people might not have as good a time or it might not generate the revenue we're hoping to generate from the event. Secondly, you could retain it. You could retain the risk, essentially self-insure it. So you say, okay, well, we are going to serve alcohol and we're going to theoretically roll the dice, and if something bad happens, we'll figure it out then. That's probably not a good approach either because most organizations and nonprofits are pretty tightly run from a budget standpoint, and if something goes wrong, it could really be detrimental to the organization. But today's topic is actually the transfer of risk. So we're going to take that risk of having alcohol at the event and we are going to choose to transfer that risk, either one to an insurance company or two to a vendor, contractual risk transfer or insurance risk transfer. And that's the topic of today's conversation. First, we're going to talk about insurance, and then we're going to finish with contractual. And when you look at the topic of insurance, we're going to break into two buckets.  So when we're talking about your stuff, we're really talking about property insurance. And the bucket of property insurance covers a lot of things. So what we're going to talk about are four general questions you want to ask yourself when you consider property insurance. First, well, what does it cover? Second, how will the carrier replace my building or replace my fine arts in the event of a claim? The third question is, for what causes of loss are covered, right, flood, fire, earthquake, what causes of loss are covered? And then the last is, for what limits? So if you could properly answer all four of these questions, you're probably in good shape for understanding your property insurance. So we're going to talk about that first, and then secondly, we'll talk about liability. But first, property insurance. So that first question again, what's typically covered? When you look at property insurance, there's four general things that are covered as part of property insurance. First being your building. So your building is the structure and everything that's fixed to the structure. So HVAC equipment, lighting, anything, the common example we give is if you could take your building, pick it up, turn it upside down and shake it. Everything that falls out is either your contents or your fine arts. Everything that's fixed to the building that does not fall out is your building itself. As mentioned, you also have contents and then business income. Business income is your operational revenue that's tied to the use of your building.  And if something were to happen to your building, you'd be in trouble and use your building to generate income and your organization might be in jeopardy. And then the last is your fine arts and your collection. Now, buried within this slide are two things. I'm going to point them out right here. The first three items, building, contents, and business income are based upon replacement cost valuation. Fine arts is based upon market value. So what does that mean? Those are really two vastly different things. They're spelled out within your insurance policy. Replacement cost, very simply, is the cost to replace. So if you have a building and you have some damage, how do you go about replacing it? Even if it's historic materials and historic craftsmanship and architectural features, even if it's hard to replace, hard to source materials, it can still be replaced. Conversely, fine art is often irreplaceable. So you have one-of-a-kind painting that is damaged. It can't be replaced. But it does have a market value, or it did have a market value before it was damaged. So we're going to get into that more in a second, but I just wanted to point out that there's a few differences between how buildings, contents, and business incomes are valued versus how fine arts are valued. Okay, so you have insurance. You have building insurance. You have contents insurance. You've got fine arts insurance. That's great. But the fact of the matter is insurance policies, if you've ever held one in your hand, they are 150 pages long. And they're 150 pages long because they spell out a lot of different ifs and buts. What the carrier is going to do and how they're going to do it and when they're not going to do it and what you have to do. And there's a lot of conditions, and obviously you want to be partnered with an insurance agent that helps you walk through any claims process. Part of the purpose of this call is to educate you on some of the larger themes of what you want to look for. But when you have a claim, damage to your building. A tree falls on part of your building. Within your insurance policy is something called the valuation clause. And what the valuation clause is, it's the promise that the carrier is going to make for how they're going to go fix your building. So what are they going to do? Are they going to allow you to use the same historic materials, the same character defining elements that define a historic building, the oak flooring, the wind coding paneling, those type of elements, or are they not going to allow you to do that? And they're just going to give you the cheapest materials available. All of that is spelled within the policy. So within general terms, there's three types of valuations. The first one, which is the worst, is called actual cash value. This is how auto insurance works. If you're driving around town in a 2010 Toyota Camry and you total it, your insurance company is not going to buy you a brand new Toyota Camry. They're going to give you the Kelly Blue Book value of your 2010 Camry. So the reason it's less is it accounts for depreciation. So you might have damage to a building. You need to fix it with $100,000 worth of repairs. But after it counts for depreciation, you might only get a claims check for $60,000 or $40,000, which obviously would not help you fix your building in entirety. So actual cash value tends to be the worst. It's traditionally how a lot of historic buildings are insured by some of the lesser known insurance carriers who might not know how to insure a historic building. It's also how vacant buildings tend to be insured. But in short, it's not good. Replacement cost is, it used to be the best. Replacement cost is the most common best method to repair a building. And within the replacement cost valuation is some wording that I put the little quotes around. But it's the cost to repair using like-kind and quality materials. Now the problem, if you read the quote, as I read it, it's very subjective because like-kind and quality might mean one thing to carrier A, you know, chub or travelers, and it might meet an entirely different thing to a different carrier. So you're at the time of claim and you've got damage to your historic building.  So this is actually why we were developed through the National Trust. It's because before our existence replacement cost was the best. And we had some owners, stewards of historic buildings that had claims and they were adjusted on a replacement cost basis, and they weren't happy with how their insurance carriers were helping them repair their historic buildings with subpar materials. So what's becoming more common, though not entirely industry-wide, is a better term, which is called historic replacement cost. This is the very best. It's worth pointing out it's not provided by all insurance carriers. It's still only a handful of insurance carriers that will agree to do it, but it's defined as the cost of repair using the same historic materials, craftsmanship, and architectural features. So this is the gold standard for how a historic building should be insured. It takes away all subjectivity related to it. It allows the owner or the board that ever sees the building to source their own materials, artists and contractors to do the work. Because if you're the owner or you're the Monticello Foundation, for instance, and there is damage to Monticello, 20% of the building is damaged, 80% of the building is undamaged. The last thing you want to do is repair that 20% so that it doesn't perfectly match the 80%. The goal of an insurance claim adjustment is to make it as so the claim never occurred. So it looks like nothing ever happened. But if you repair the 20% with modern materials or it's not perfectly matched, well, then it's going to be noticeable. So your valuation clause, again, is pretty important. I tend to think it's more important than the limit of insurance you carry or the other coverage features because you want to know, if you're going to buy a policy, you want to know how your carrier is going to treat you at the time of the claim. So this is, again, the valuation for buildings, business contents, and business income. I remember going back to this screen, we talked about how there's three where it's in the bucket of replacement cost valuation. But fine arts are different, right? Because fine arts can't be replaced. So when you look at the valuation clause on a fine arts policy or the fine arts section of a policy, there's really two general valuations. The first one is market value and the second one is a great value. Market value tends to be the most common. So it generally means the cost at the time of claim that the item would have been worth, which is a fairly subjective way of treating it, but it tends to be the best. The best that's available. Fine arts adjusters rely on things like appraisals and some sort of pre-claims, substantiation as to what the item is worth, comparables, but ultimately their goal is to give you either fix it, you know, if it's damaged to a frame or damaged to a small element of the item, you know, can we fix it? Can we conserve it? But if it's completely damaged, it's a market value. It's how much it was worth, and they're going to make you compensated for the loss of the item. It's worth noting that, again, it does help to have some sort of pre-claim substantiation, like an appraisal. You know, the fine art market and you all know better than I do, so hopefully I don't sound too ignorant, but, you know, it varies based upon public interest. So you have things like the brown furniture market, which is, you know, the market is going down for items like that, and antique. Conversely, modern art is going up. So if you bought a policy to... you had a collection of brown furniture and you insured it for $100,000, you know, five, ten years ago, and every year your policy kind of rolls over and it's the same $100,000, and you're really not thinking about it. And then you have a claim. It could happen that the market depreciated for brown furniture that the market value of those items at the time of claim could be far less than $100,000. Even though you insured it for $100,000, doesn't mean you're getting $100,000. You're getting the market value at the time of claim. So an alternative for that is agreed value. So you are basically agreeing with the insurance company at the time the policy is written that this is what we think the items are worth, $100,000. We really don't care what you think at the time of claim. We want, assuming the items are completely lost and completely damaged, we want $100,000 based upon what we think the items are worth at the time the policy is written. To get agreed value, there oftentimes needs to be some sort of substantiation, right? So the insurance carrier is not going to agree to it unless they kind of have evidence via appraisal or some sort of schedule or receipt even that the item is worth what it is. Okay, so that's, again, the second question, right? Remember, the first question is what's covered? The second question is how will the carrier make you whole? The third question in property insurance is for what causes of loss, right? You buy insurance, you buy property insurance for when something goes wrong. A cause of loss is that thing that went wrong. It could be a fire. It could be a water damage, a broken pipe. It could be a flood, an earthquake, vandalism. There's a whole world of things that could happen. And a cause of loss form is one of those pages buried within your 100-page property insurance policy. And it's very important. It spells out exactly what's covered and what's not covered. And really, there's two types of cause of loss forms. The first one is basic form, and the second one is special form. Basic form's the worst. Special form is the best. Basic form provides coverage for named events only. So they list 10 to 12 events. The most common are fire, lightning, explosion, smoke, windstorm, hail, riot, civil commotion, aircraft, vehicles, vandalism, sprinkler leakage, sinkhole collapse, and volcanic action. If it is not one of those items, well, you don't have coverage. So you could have, you know, you could buy, you know, $10 million worth of insurance. And you could have historic replacement cost valuation. You could have everything you think is superior. But if you have a basic form policy and something happens that is not covered, such as weight of snow, or most commonly for a historic building, water damage, then you don't have coverage. So what you really want to have is special form. Special form is fairly common. It's not that hard to get, if I'm being honest. Some insurance carriers, I think, do their clients a big disservice by trying to pass off basic form when they could pass off special form. But, you know, not all insurance companies are created equal. Special form, instead of naming the things that are covered, they simply go by telling you the things that are not covered. So they will say in the special form policy, we'll cover all events, all perils, that are not excluded. So unless it's excluded, it's covered. So you have to look to the exclusions. And common exclusions you'll find are the larger ones, which are flood and earthquake. Those are the kind of catastrophic perils that all insurance companies tend to exclude. And, you know, in the case of flood, the government has their National Flood Insurance Plan. So if you're in a flood zone, that's probably your primary remedy for getting flood coverage just through NFIP, the National Flood Insurance Plan. But if you're not in a flood zone, if you are in an area of the country that's just not in a flood zone, you could definitely get flood coverage through your insurance company. And it's the same with earthquake. If you are not in an earthquake prone zone, you're probably asked to get earthquake coverage. But, you know, unfortunately, if you're in Southern California or areas of the country along fault lines, you're probably not getting earthquake coverage. Again, so that was your third question for what causes of loss. And then the last question, which tends to be the first question that people think of, because it's the big round number on your policy, is for what limits? You know, how much are we ensuring our building for? How much are we ensuring our collection for? And it's a very important question. Don't get me wrong. I would make the argument that the previous questions we asked, the valuation clause, the causes of loss are more important, but it's certainly important to have enough insurance. So when you're looking at your limits, you want to have a limit for all four of those categories. Your building limit is how much do you ensure you're building for? And that could be a really difficult question to answer because people don't know how to go about ensuring a historic building. There's no Kelly Blue Book, right? There's no determination as to how much a building should be insured for. You could have one building on a city block that is insured for $400 a square foot, and the building right next door should be insured for $1,000 a square foot, and the building next to that could be insured for $150 a square foot. And the construction materials, the methods, the finishes, the materials, all of that matter. So this is a lot of what we do on a day-to-day basis. We help people determine a starting point for ensuring a historic building. We have vendors. There's historic appraisal vendors out there that can help with this. But one thing I want to stress is that your limit is not the market value. So, you know, oftentimes we'll tell a client that your building should be insured for $2 million based upon a variety of factors. And they'll say, I couldn't get $2 million for my building. Our building is only worth $100,000. It's, you know, a bad part of town or we're in Nebraska, and nothing sells for $200,000. Market value and replacement value are totally different. You could have a beautiful house museum in Nebraska that has a market value of $500,000. But if you put that same house museum in downtown Philadelphia, the market value might be $5 million. But it's the same house. It's the same building. So it's just a huge variety. We don't focus on market value and building insurance. We focus on replacement value. What's the cost to replace it if there was damage? And generally speaking, even though the cost of construction in this country, you're in the same general ballpark when it comes to replacement value. So the rule of thumb that we have, which is, you know, it's very loose, so don't hold me to it too closely, is that a historic building should be insured for no less than $150 square foot. And I'll tell you why in a second. But it can often be higher. When it comes to your contents limit, your insurance agent can probably help a little bit, but really it comes down to your inventory.  You can kind of develop that. Your business income limit is also pretty hard to determine. There's something called a business income worksheet. Your insurance agent can provide you with. It's an accounting document that takes into account your revenue and your expenses, and it helps you determine the appropriate limit for business income. And then your fine art limit, which is something you're probably familiar with, is, you know, you want to have a schedule and a praise or possibly, depending on the size of your collection. But at the very least, I recommend having some sort of schedule of your items, especially your high value items. You know, the more documentation you have, the better. And then lastly, going back to, you know, what you want to ensure you're building for, property insurance policy called co-insurance. Co-insurance is a penalty for under-insurance. So if you have a claim and the insurance company comes out and they determine that you under-insured your building, you should have insured it for $250 a square foot, but you chose to insure it for $50 a square foot. So much lower. They can assess your co-insurance penalty, which really affects your claims payout.  So you just want to make sure you have a healthy limit and that you try not to under-insure your building. Okay. So, you know, just to bring it all together, I just want to run through a quick claim scenario, you know, paint the whole picture and why they're also important. So you have a broken internal water pipe and it bursts, causing $400,000 worth of damage to the building and to some fine art. You go through the questions that we talked about. Do you have coverage for building and fine art? Well, let's assume you do. What cause of loss form do you have? If you have the basic form, well, unfortunately, you don't have insurance coverage because water damage isn't covered. Water damage is not covered as part of the basic form. If you have a special form, you have coverage. That's great. So let's assume you have the special form. We go to the next question. What valuation cause do you have for the building? Is it actual cash value? Are you going to get nickel undimed? It's part of that $400,000 worth of damage and they're not going to pay for the lanes cutting and you're going to be in a difficult spot. Do you have replacement cost? And if so, are you with a carrier that's going to help protect the historic elements you're building? Or do you have historic replacement cost? Which, again, is the best. What valuation cause do you have for the fine art? Is it market value or is it crude value? And then lastly, for what limits? Do you have enough insurance? $400,000 worth of damage. Do you have plenty of insurance to cover that? If not, you might have a co-insurance issue. So it all kind of comes together. It's why property insurance policies are hundreds of pages long because all these questions need to be answered, among other ones that we are not going to get into today. So that's your property insurance. Remember, we talked about the two kind of elements. You had the property and then the liability. So we talked about your stuff. You're building your content, your fine arts, those types of things. Now we're going to talk about your negligence. So these are the business risks associated with the operations of your organization. Similar to property insurance, there's a few questions you want to answer. What type of coverage do you need? What limits that you carry? And then, since negligence tends to result from lawsuits or results in lawsuits, how is legal defense handled? Those three questions are important. Let's talk about the types of coverage. The most common type of coverage that every organization needs if you are operating in really any capacity is general liability. General liability provides coverage for third-party bodily injury and third-party property damage. So this isn't property damage to your stuff. This is third-party property damage. But for all intents and purposes, it is bodily injury. It's someone got hurt as a result of your operations. So you have a patron that falls on a floor.  It could be really anything, but it tends to happen around slips and falls for our kind of class of business. It can include liquor liability. It can include special event liability, but it's all kind of falls together in the same bucket of general liability. Now general liability works is it'll provide coverage for all causes of loss except the ones that are excluded. So similar to that special form property, you want to look to the exclusions. What's excluded? Contractual liability, pollution, nuclear. There are some exclusions in general liability as well. But you want to make sure that, you know, most general liability policies are pretty broad. So that's a good thing. So you have a general liability policy. It provides a $1 million limit. Your board says we're very, we have a low risk tolerance. We want to have higher limits. So you can buy an umbrella liability. An umbrella liability is simply an extension of your general liability. If you're a small house museum, you might need a million dollar general liability and that's it.  And then directors and officers liability, which is different, right? General liability and umbrella liability involves some sort of bodily injury. Directors and officers liability involves no bodily injury. It really comes down to wrongful acts, which essentially means bad decision making, bad decisions made by the board. So board misappropriates funds. There's some sort of oversight where they, you know, fail to do something. A regulatory body sues the nonprofit. Every state's different. There is nonprofit immunity in many states related to serving on a board of a nonprofit. But if there's really gross negligence scenarios, the board can find themselves in a director's and officer's claim.  It covers wrongful acts. The wrongful acts is defined in the policy. But it typically tends to be pretty broad and it says it's going to cover errors and emissions made by the board, breach of duty, those type of things. And there are exclusions as well. A director's and officer's liability also tends to cover though not always employment practices, liability claims, which are wrongful termination of employees, harassment claims, those type of things. Moreover, in addition to the policies just mentioned, you'd want to make sure you have workers' compensation if you have employees. That's required by most states, depending on the number of employees you have. You won't have volunteer accident if you have volunteer labor, such as docent of your museum or, you know, volunteers that help clean up the grounds. If they get hurt, you want to have coverage for them. And then there's a variety of miscellaneous policies like auto liability if you have cars and cyber liability, which is pretty new in our world, and then fiduciary liability. I want to focus though on workers' comp. Workers' comp really have it. You intend to have it for your employees, right? So you've got 10 employees and you've got whatever, $300,000 a payroll. You want to have workers' compensation coverage for any employee that's hurt on the job. It's pretty straightforward. It's statutory. It's required. But if you have an uninsured contractor, so you hire an electrician or you hire a roofer to do some work, and they are hurt while working on behalf of your organization, and it turns out that they don't have their own workers' compensation policy and they are hurt, well, guess whose workers' compensation policy is going to cover it? It's going to be yours because most states are pretty, they side with the injured employee, meaning they're going to find some sort of coverage for that injured employee. So it's important, and we're going to get into this in a little bit, when you're working with vendors and contractors, you want to make sure they have their own insurance and we'll explain why in a little bit. That's one touch on that. And then class codes, which is how workers' compensation policy and their compensation policies are established. They talk about, you know, the job function of the employee. The clerical tends to be people that never really leave the office or leave the workspace. It tends to be a finance or a receptionist or people that don't do much. Well, they do a lot, but they don't participate in the museum operations such as docent or grounds maintenance or any other type shop. So those are the two common codes, but there are plenty of other ones, property management codes and codes related to other, and every state might have a couple unique class codes, but those are the two broad ones that tend to apply. So again, these are the types of coverages you want to consider when you speak with your insurance agent about. But the second question is what limits, right? So some sort of property insurance, what limits do we carry? Fortunately, the answer tends to be a lot easier than liability than it is in property because a lot of the limits are standardized. When you look at a general liability policy, most commonly you'll find that a general liability policy provides one million per occurrence with two million annual aggregate. And what that means is you have a million dollars per claim, but you have two million dollars to use per year. So you could have two one million dollar claims. You could have four, five hundred thousand dollar claims. The aggregate refers to the full bucket of money and then per occurrence refers to per loss. But then, as mentioned, you could buy an umbrella policy and you could take that one million dollar per occurrence limit and take it all the way up to a hundred million or higher if you wanted to.  Directors and officers' liability tends to start at a million dollars as well. And then depending on the size of your organization, the assets that you carry, your payroll amount, you should consider a D&O policy on up to five million dollars or higher. And again, it comes down to what's happening. You know, sometimes you'll find an organization that's in a capital campaign to restore their building or raise money for something that's doing construction in some capacity. The risk of, you know, potential poor decisions or potential claims could be higher, so you might carry out a higher policy at those times. And then workers' compensation is very easy because there is no limit. The statutory benefits are unlimited, so workers' compensation claims can go on up to whatever you need to carry. But, you know, lawyers are lawyers, right? They charge a lot of money. And if you get sued because someone claims that they slipped at your facility, even though you may not feel that there was any negligence, you know, the ground wasn't wet, there's no crack in the sidewalk, person fell because they were clumsy, you know, nothing prohibits them from hiring an attorney anyway and suing your organization anyway. So when you find yourself in a general liability type claim or a director's and officer's liability type claim, oftentimes the biggest expense is hiring an attorney to defend yourself, make the lawsuit go away. Unfortunately, these policies have legal defense built in, so you do get legal defense when you buy these policies. On a general liability policy, the legal defense is outside the limit of insurance, so that $1 million limit, your legal fees are outside of that, which is good, they're unlimited, so you know, your lawyer fees can go as high as they need to go. Umbrella liability follows the general liability. And directors and officers' liability, sometimes it's outside the limit, which is a good thing, meaning it doesn't erode your limit, but sometimes it can be inside. So if it's inside the limit, then you just want to be aware of that when you're picking what limit to carry, because legal fees can be expensive and the trickier the claim, the higher the legal bills.  And the second one will kind of take us to the second part of the proposal, part of that webinar. So this one is, you know, kind of a really worst-case scenario, right? Active shooter scenario occurs at your museum or your facility, loss of life, other, occurs. So attorneys for the injured sue the museum for third-party bodily injury, right? People were hurt at your site. That's general liability claim. And they also, the creative attorneys that they are, they sue the board for improper security methods, right? No, the board, they should have known that, you know, that this was a potential target. They should have had better security. You know, they should have known better. So you find yourself in a claim of $5 million that is part general liability and part directors and officers liability. You know, there's no one saying that one claim has to be on one policy. Sometimes you have a really big, airy kind of claim and it falls into multiple categories and that's what this would be. So do you have a general liability policy? Likely you do. Do you have a directors and officers liability? Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. What limits do you carry, right? Do you have enough to cover $5 million lawsuit? And then how is legal defense handled? That's a pretty straightforward claim, right? The second one isn't as straightforward and unfortunately it's the less straightforward ones that seem to happen often, more than the straightforward ones. But while cleaning your gutters, a third-party contractor falls off a ladder and enters himself. So you've hired a contractor, a local contractor.  He's offered to clean your gutters for, you know, really cheap. You say, why not? He puts his ladder up, he climbs to the top and he falls off. Well, he's hurt. You know, he doesn't have his own insurance. You've never collected proof of insurance. He could sue your organization for his injuries. He could file a claim under your workers' compensation. There's a whole bunch of things that could happen. And that's what we want to avoid. So this is going to what takes us into the next part of it, which is contractual risk transfer. So the old is, why be on the hook for claims when it's not your fault, right? It should be the people that you're working with. You don't want to become the deep pocket. So when you look at the second part of it, right? So the first part of it again, risk transfer via insurance. That's what we just talked about. Now we're going to talk about risk transfer via a contract, right? So these are the people you're working with, the vendors, the contractors, the people that could potentially pull you into a lawsuit, the people that are renting your facility, the bride and groom that are getting married on site. There is something that I call the three-legged stool of risk management. It's basically having any good three-legged stool. You need all three legs to be sturdy. For the stool to be sturdy, there needs to be a contract. And within the contract, there needs to be an indemnification agreement, which we'll talk about. There needs to be some sort of insurance requirements, which we'll talk about. You need to gather proof of insurance that the person signed the contract, that's great. They agreed to carry the insurance. That's great too. But did they actually carry the insurance? Did they actually comply with the contract? That's probably one of the most important elements. And we're going to talk about all of it. So this is the three-legged stool, kind of broken down in less graphic form, more bullet-pointed form. But the contract, you know, I'm not an attorney, but you should have a contract with anybody you work with, vendors and contractors, and even facility rentals. There needs to be some sort of basic contract. And within that contract, there should be an indemnification agreement. It's usually a paragraph blurb. It's also called a hold harmless agreement. And it's basically saying that that third party is going to hold you harmless for any negligence that they might incur that pulls you into a lawsuit. You should have an attorney either on your board or you should hire an attorney to draft up a good indemnification agreement. Insurance agents for the record cannot create an indemnification agreement because we're not attorneys. But, you know, an attorney can do that for you. So let's assume you've got the contract. And within that contract, oftentimes you'll find insurance requirements, right? It's what you're requiring of your contractor or vice versa. It's going to be what someone is requiring of you. We're going to talk about insurance requirements. I'm going to give you some guidance as to some proper insurance requirements. And then lastly, what we'll finish with is the certificate of insurance. This is proof that the insurance requirements were complied with. There's a certificate of insurance form which you may have seen a hundred times in your lifetime or even more thousands of times in your lifetime. And maybe you've never really studied it to know what you're looking at. You might breeze through it so you can know what you're looking for and hopefully go from there. Okay, so I think, I don't know how exactly it's set up, but there are some handouts. I guess it's in this links area, NTIS handout. Within that handout, there's a couple of documents that you can take with you. Some sample insurance requirements. This is the language you want to put into your agreements that you'd want to require of your contractors and your vendors and facility rentals and things like that. But we're just going to go through it, explain what you want to have, why you want to have it, and really just go from there. So again, this is what you're requiring of the people that you hire. So let's just use an example. You are hiring an electrician to rewire the building.  And within that, there's a principle called additional insured. So if the contractor pulls you into a lawsuit related to someone being hurt, you have insurance. Just in the last section, we talked about all the insurance you need to carry. And you have your own general liability policy. And that's great. But do you really want to use it? Do you want to file a claim with your general liability carrier if it wasn't your negligence to begin with? Well, no. It's the electrician's negligence or the roofer who messed up your roof or the catering company who gave everybody food poisoning or the bride in the groom that destroyed your building or the patron that got hurt. There's all these scenarios that occur where you as the facility might have no negligence, you want their insurance. So being an additional insured under their insurance grants you protection under their insurance. So it's very important to be an additional insured. Things like auto liability could be important. For a bride in the groom getting married at your facility, not very important for them to have auto liability, but for a roofer who might be using their vehicles on your property or using some sort of crane scenario, having auto liability could be important. Worker's comp is very important. Again, I gave the example of the guy cleaning the gutters and he falls off the roof.  You don't want it to be yours. And then umbrella liability, depending on the scope of the project, the low hazard contractor, you hire a janitor. A janitor probably doesn't need to show an umbrella liability policy because the worst thing they can do is, I don't know, something fairly minor. But on a high hazard job, like a full construction project, and you are doing a $3 million restoration of a building and you've hired a general contractor who's going to turn around and hire all these subcontractors. Well, that's a scenario where you might want to have them carry a $3, $4, $5 million umbrella policy. So there's some subjectivity built in. And then there's some thought around the type of work you're hiring. So if you are hiring a catering company to serve alcohol at your event, in addition to general liability, and workers' comp and those things, you want to make sure they have liquor liability. If you are hiring an attorney, right, or an accountant to do some work on behalf of your organization, you want to make sure that they have professional liability, which is coverage for bad advice, essentially. You know, an accountant misses a comma on your tax return, which results in some sort of financial damages. You know, professional liability is what professionals carry for their work. So there's some subjectivity there. So again, this is kind of what we're looking at on your screen is the top half of this insurance requirements page. The bottom half is kind of the fine print. It's actually this page and the next page. And I'm not going to go through all of them, but I just want to go through a few of them and I'll tend to do it fairly quickly. The first one is you want the policies to be written with a reputable company, right, that's A-rated. You want their insurance companies to be solid insurance companies. You want their insurance to be primary to your insurance, right? It's called primary non-contributor. You want the contractor's insurance to pay up first before your insurance pays up. You want to know if their policies cancel. So you hire a general contractor on January 1st, and they give you all the proper documentation. Here, I've got insurance. I've got everything. And then on March 1st, they fail to pay their insurance bill and their insurance cancels. And then you have a claim on June 1st, and they have no insurance. And you're sitting there thinking, well, I collected proof of insurance before the project started, but they went ahead and their insurance canceled. So notice of cancellation is something that their insurance company can provide to you if they fail to pay their premium or if they are getting canceled for some other reason. There's something called waiver of subrogation, which you won't go into, but you want the contractor to waive subrogation to you. Subrogation is the process where insurance companies start suing each other. They say, well, your insured was 80% negligent and my client was 20% negligent, so we're going to do each other and try to work out the damages upon the scene. You want to avoid that, especially when you're hiring a contractor so you want to have them waive subrogation, meaning their insurance company can't sue yours. You know, just, again, more fine print. You want the requirements to be maintained for any kind of rework, additional work.  Subcontractors of the contractors need to comply as well. Contractor will give prompt notice if something happens. So these are all things. And then the last thing is you want documentation, right? This is the third leg of the stool, right? We've got the contract, we've got the identification clause, we've got the insurance requirements, we've got the certificate of liability, we've got the certificate of liability, we just went through. And the last thing is that documentation, which is the certificate of insurance, proof that they are not just signing this contract without not actually complying with them. So that's what we're going to focus on now. So this is the top half. This is the bottom half. Together it's called an Accord certificate of liability. You may have seen this before. Maybe you haven't. There's people that are using your facility that they have insurance. And I just want to go through it, explain what it is, what you're looking for, the key elements of it. So the insured, this first box right here, it says insured, it's a little fuzzy, this is who you are working, this is who you hired. If you hired a roofing contractor called ABC Roofers and you get a certificate that does not say ABC Roofers, well then you are not looking at their insurance. Certificate. So it needs to match who you've hired. Right here is the name of the insurance company that they have. General liability section is right here. Their policy number is right here, and we'll talk about why that's important in a second. Their policy term is right here and here. And their limits of insurance are right here. So why is it important for you to keep an eye on the policy term? Because if you, this one is a little old, it says July 1, 2017 to July 1, 2018. If you get a certificate for a job that's occurring in January 2020 and this certificate says 2017 to 18, well, it's of no good. The work needs to be done within that window when the policy is active. And if the policy expires, you need to get a new certificate. But if you have a claim, right, so something happens and you hire a contractor to fix your roof, and it looks like they fixed your roof, and hey, this is great, thank you.  And two months later, the roof leaks and it's determined that the roofer didn't do such good of a job. So you can certainly file a claim with your property insurance carrier, your building carrier, and there would be a deductible involved, and hopefully your property insurance carrier would handle it properly. But why are we doing this at all? Because at the end of the day, you hired a contractor to fix your roof. They did not do what you hired them to do. This is when you pull the certificate of liability that you got way back when, before they did the work. You can call their insurance company. You can give them their policy number. You can say, I am an additional insured, and it's very small, you can't see it here, but that's where the specs is right here. It means you're an additional insured, and file a claim with their insurance company. So it's good to keep these on file, particularly for construction projects, that you might not discover the damage, that the plumbing wasn't done properly, or the electrical work wasn't done right for many years. You want to keep these on file. This is the bottom half of the certificate, which has less information, but auto liability would be here, umbral liability would be here, workers' compensation would be here. There is various things, you know, specific wording that you might find in your contract would be listed here. And then at the very bottom, it's a certificate holder, which is you. Together, this makes up your certificate of insurance. You want to collect this from, in an ideal world, and I understand it's not practical on smaller scales, but on larger scales and medium-sized scales of hiring a contractor, hiring a vendor, a catering company, a large wedding. You want to have certificates of insurance.  You know, there's instances like that where you can just say, we don't need to require a certificate from these visuals for this group. So, again, there's some subjectivity in all of this, but for the most part, you want to collect a certificate from everybody. Okay, so last kind of example we're near in the end where I can open it up to any questions is your venue hires a third-party catering company to serve alcohol during performances. As a result of the vendors' improper protocols, a 19-year-old who has ever served alcohol or alcohol at all, for that matter, they leave the venue and they injure many victims in a trunk driving accident. We've actually had this happen to one of our clients. It was very unfortunate, and they, you know, took all the proper steps and, you know, let me just walk through the two kind of scenarios. So with full contractual risk transfer, so that's the three-legged stool that we talked about. You have a contract, you have insurance requirements, you've collected certificate, right? So with full contractual risk transfer, a sturdy stool, you have a signed indemnity agreement, right, that creates a legal requirement for them to hold you harmless. The contract spells out exactly what the vendor needs to carry, i.e. liquor liability. You have a certificate on file from the, well, this is for a theater organization, but you have a certificate on file naming your organization as an additional insured, right? So in this scenario, you can file a claim under their policy. You are fully protected and covered by their policy. I'll note that you still have your insurance. Your insurance is the safety net. If something goes wrong, your policy is there to kind of step up. But again, this is not your negligence. This is your vendor's negligence. You want their insurance to respond, right? Now, that's best-case scenario. Worst-case scenario or medium-worst-case scenario is without that full risk transfer, which is why the three-legged stool is so important. You have a signed contract that you've gone that far, right? You've created this legal requirement for them to hold you harmless. And of course, the contract, which is the contract, spells out exactly what they were supposed to carry. They were supposed to carry liquor liability. But you failed to collect your certificate of insurance. Coincidentally, the vendor let their policies last by not paying the premium. The vendor was uninsured at the time of the claim. So, you know, three weeks before the event, they forgot to pay the premium. The policy is canceled. The claim happens. You know, you've got two of the legs of the stool. You've got the contract that creates the indemnification. You've got the requirement that they carry insurance, but they just don't have it. So while the vendor is legally obligated to hold you harmless, you know, it's catering companies, right? They have no assets. They might have a truck and some, you know, some sternos. They don't have much. So they might be on the hook legally speaking from the millions of dollars in negligence that their employee did by serving that person. But in practical purposes, they've got nothing to back it up. So it's likely that your insurance is going to be the primary and sole remedy. So that's why it's important to have all three of those legs of the stool in place. So that is everything. I know I threw a lot of information out at you. I likely probably missed a couple things going through. But I certainly am free to take any questions you have. Thanks so much. That was a great coverage of this topic. And we were talking earlier about how I feel like we covered this topic when I was in school 15 years ago. We talked about insurance. But every time I do one of these webinars, it always feels like I learned so much more. I'm not sure I hear a new topic or a speaker talk about it. Well, I'm going to go ahead and ask if we had some questions given to us throughout the webinar that I'm going to start going through. And if anyone else wants to go ahead and add any questions to the chat box, I'll keep taking a look at it to make sure that we've covered everything. That sounds good to you, Kevin. Yeah, oh yeah. Okay, great. So one of our first questions is if you can kind of define what is encompassed in brown furniture. Yeah, so that's probably the questions better answered by one of the listeners of this. But I work with the National Trust Historic Preservation. They're probably my biggest client because I handle their insurance as well. And they have a large collection of antique furniture. So collectable collections are basically antique furniture. And in working with, we ensure their collection, the National Trust collection, and they happen to, since they're a large organization, they get it appraised every year or every so often. And we've had conversations that there's been variations of their appraisal because the brown furniture market, the collection items have been going down while the modern art has been going up. So I was just using that as an example to kind of paint the picture of the market value talk. No, that makes sense. That was kind of the consensus among the chat, but we just wanted to make sure that we had clarification on the term. And then it also kind of, the same person basically asked, they're kind of interested in that space around decorative art and whether a carrier would include them with fine arts coverage as irreplaceable or not. He also went on to ask, how does this relate to extremely unique historic items that are truly irreplaceable? Yeah, that's a good question. Most carriers will be flexible to whatever you want to do.  If you feel that you want to ensure that item on a market value basis, meaning you want to be compensated for what that item is worth at the time of claim, then you could certainly ensure it as a piece of fine art. You know, the example I give, and it's pretty general, would be if you had a desk, you know, it's a nice old desk and you use it to do work on, you could in theory ensure that nice old desk as a piece of fine art, meaning if something was damaged to it, you could be compensated on a market value, whatever that antique desk was worth, or you could ensure it as a piece of replacement cost. You could say if that desk was damaged, maybe you wouldn't get, they can't replace it with a newer version of that, or an older version of that desk, but maybe you get a newer desk. It really comes down to what you want to do, and most insurance companies are flexible with how you want to do it. And then what was the second part of that question again? She says, how does this relate to extremely unique historic items that are truly irreplaceable? Yeah, so I would argue that most, or not most, but many items within a collection are irreplaceable. I mean, certainly there might be multiple prints of the same painting, but when it comes down to things that are really truly irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind items, there is still a market value for it. And in fact, if they are one-of-a-kind, then it might have a really high market value. So that's the whole purpose of a fine arts policy, is to pay the market value. So it might benefit you to have an appraisal so that you know what you're insuring it for, but even in the absence of an appraisal, your insurance company is going to pay the market value up to the limit of insurance of what that item is worth. It might be hard to determine what that item is worth, right? You know, we've all watched the antique rojo and the variations of that, right? To determine what a one-of-a-kind type thing is worth, but there's always some sort of value just to everything including one-of-a-kind item. Yeah, no, I agree. And the same person went on to say, aren't there issues around appraising accession items? And I'll just answer quickly that I know me as a person who's worked as a contract registrar and just a working registrar, I know we can never really do appraisal. We have to go out to outside appraisers to get those values, just because those folks are trained to do that. And ethically speaking, we can't really put the money price on them when we're looking at it as we're working within the registration field. So that's something to always kind of consider as well. Someone also said, do you know how much this applies to other countries? Like, is this an industry standard across all of North America? I mean, I know you're based here in the United States, but do you have any insight into what's kind of going on in other countries? Not particularly. No, I don't. You know, 100% of our work is domestic. Obviously, you can buy insurance in other countries. I think the principles of insurance are fairly worldwide. The policy language might be... there might be variances of it internationally. I think generally speaking, the principles of everything we talked about apply anywhere there's an insurance policy to purchase. But I would assume that there's definitely variations of it. Yeah, I know someone in the chat shared an article about stuff that's going on in the UK. So I think that this is really kind of a country-based thing and that you'd have to end up talking to specialists within each country, which always... Yeah, and the UK is similar to... you know, the UK is very similar to what we do.  Now, this is an interesting one because I know I've worked with libraries and archives. Someone's asking about, how would you go about getting insurance for an archive where the documents, photographs have no real monetary value that they are irreplaceable and are of historic importance? Yeah, that's a difficult one. It can be done. There is something... there's elements of property insurance. It's called valuable papers coverage. It's kind of a hybrid between fine arts and traditional contents coverage. You know, you can't replicate archival documents, but sometimes you can replicate them. I don't know if I'm going to answer that question in the way she or she asked it, but what I'll... I guess how I will answer it is probably to engage an expert. You know, we use or we refer out to a company called Paul Mall Art Advisors that are based out of Philadelphia. They are experts in assessing the value, the proper value for all types of items, including valuable papers. And then once you've kind of established some sort of limit, that really just comes down to you've got documentation from an expert, i.e. Paul Mall or a different appraiser, and you can insure it for whatever you think is necessary. And at the time of claim, that's what, you know, tends to be settled or agreed upon between you and the insurance company. But yeah, I often get asked that question. It is a difficult one because they don't have a value, but they're certainly important, but they are hard to insure, but there are some creative ways to go about doing it. Yeah, I know whenever I was working full-time at museums, I would always just refer folks, because we'd often get called for people asking, well, how much is this thing worth? And I would just basically say, go check out appraisers. I think it was like appraisers.org. I believe I'll confirm that, but it's the Society of Appraisers, so you can go out and help them get your values and all that kind of fun stuff whenever you're doing it, even when it comes to like archival collections and things like that. Here's another question. It says, we have a waiver of subrogation questions on every loan. Can you further explain what waiver of subrogation means between two institutions? What does it mean for the museum that asked for it? And what does it mean for our insurance policy grants the waiver to another museum? Yeah, so a waiver of subrogate, well, to talk about what a waiver of subrogation is, let's talk about what subrogation is. So subrogation is the process after a claim has been settled. So two parties are involved in some sort of lawsuit and let's give the most common type of claim, which is an auto insurance claim. You're driving down the highway and someone is changing lanes and they clip your car. You pull over to the side of the road. You gather the person to do with that fault. You gather their insurance information and their insurance company fixes the damage to your car. Right? That's pretty straightforward. The process of subrogation occurs after all of that is done. The two insurance companies, your insurance company and their insurance company, get together and they determine negligence. They determine who is really at fault, to what degree was that person at fault. They might determine that, yeah, my driver was 80% at fault, but your driver was 20% at fault. So the insurance company that originally had paid 100% of the damage, they're going to try to collect 20% of it back from the other insurance company. It's a process of insurance companies essentially suing each other after a claim to try to recoup some of their money if it was determined that it wasn't 100% negligence, it was kind of partial negligence. So subrogation is kind of a bad practice. It doesn't happen that often. It doesn't happen on small claims, but on large claims, big fires and big liability claims. Insurance companies are going to try to collect back whatever they can and if they have to sue the other insurance company to get whatever they can back, they will. So it is what it is. Again, it is what it is. A waiver of subrogation is something that you grant, one party grants to another, or you mutually waive, be a mutual waiver of subrogation, that you're saying before the claim occurs, usually when the contract is being signed, that we're agreeing that if there ever is a claim, our insurance companies won't sue each other. I'm waiving the right for my insurance company to sue you, and you're waiving the right for your insurance company to sue my insurance company. And sometimes it's one-sided. Sometimes it's a one-sided waiver that, hey, my insurance company can sue yours, but yours can't sue mine. So it comes into play a lot for landlord-tenant type of relationships because you need to maintain the balance between having a good, you know, if there's some sort of claim where the landlord damages a tenant space, you know, you don't want the tenant's insurance company to, it just kind of becomes a little bit problematic. So it's pretty common, and it's normally acceptable. Most insurance companies are okay with you waiving their rights as long as you've done it via contract and you've done it before the claim. You can't waive subrogation after a claim has occurred. Great, thank you so much. I was always confused by that as well, so I appreciate that. Here's another question. It says, what are the consequences to filing a claim with your insurance? For insurance, does it make your policy cost rise? That's a hard one to answer because it all comes down to the size of the claim and the amount of premium. But let me answer it a different way. Insurance companies are in the business to make money, right? They're not nonprofits. They want to collect, let's say they want to collect $100 in premium. They recognize they've got to pay out claims.  But, you know, if they collect $100 in premium, their goal is to only pay out about $70 in claims. And that $30 difference is their overhead and profit. So as long as you have, you know, you can have a claim. It's not, again, it's why you have insurance. Insurance companies aren't going to penalize you for having a claim. But when you become unprofitable for that insurance company, meaning they are paying out more claims than they are collecting in premium, well, then they might rethink it. They might rethink the relationship and say, well, we either need to increase the rates because clearly we're not charging enough premium for this particular client.  But for the most part, these insurance companies that you're going to partner with are national, global insurance companies, right? They're A-rated by AM Best, A++ rated in a lot of instances. They have plenty of money in their reserves. They are not going to get very hung up on one particular client that has a claim that is over their amount of premium they pay. But there's a kind of a phrase we focus on in our industry. It's not the severity of a claim. It's more of the frequency. You know, you start having multiple claims, then that's what tends to raise alarm bells. One claim, almost regardless of the size of the claim, is not going to hurt you. Two claims, three claims in a year, you know, that's where you might have some problems with your insurance company wanting to maintain coverage on you. Yeah, I know. I live in the Florida Keys, and we were affected by Irma two years ago. And I know when it came to our house insurance because so many people had claimed when it came to the roof or just their house was being destroyed, it was really interesting to see kind of what happened with the premiums once we kind of went through all that. All those shenanigans. I think that's always a good question, though, whenever you have to file a claim, like what's it going to do in the long run to your policy?  But, you know, what people don't often consider is, you know, the principle of insurance is pooled risk, right? The insurance company has many clients. Some are having a lot of claims and some are having no claims. And they kind of look at everything in the group. If the group's doing well, then, you know, the rates are stable. But when you have catastrophic events, like hurricanes or the California wildfires or earthquakes or, you know, big flooding events, you know, big metropolitan cities like Harvey, that's when insurance companies start to lose money, right?  It's because the insurance company is losing in other areas and they have to kind of increase their rates. Property insurance rates have been ticking up, not like anything drastic or dramatic, but they definitely have been looking for more property insurance rates because of what's happening out in California. These insurance companies also insure themselves. They're called reinsurance. So their reinsurance costs have gone up and they're trying to figure it all out. So sometimes it's not always your individual account. It's the greater risk as well. It looks like we have one final question. It says, would an indemnification clause be standard in a contract with a snow removal contractor? If there's a certificate of insurance on file but no indemnity clause, would the liability be shared in the event of a slip and fall? That is probably a legal question that I can't answer. So indemnification, I'm kind of stammering a little bit because my training has taught me, I've looked at dozens of indemnification agreements in my career and one word different in the indemnification clause can change the entire meaning of it. One single word, which is why attorneys start with the charge, of course. But if you've collected insurance from the contractor and you're an additional insured on their policy and there's some sort of claim, like on a slip and fall and maybe the snow removal contractor was negligent because they didn't properly remove the salty ice or whatever, there is still negligence even without absence of a contract. Meaning even if there is no indemnification agreement or an improper indemnification agreement, there's still negligence. I mean, they still, in theory, did something wrong. So you could certainly utilize their insurance to do that. I don't know if that answered the question, but I think that's the best I can offer at the moment. That's totally fine. And we appreciate you kind of going out of your scope, your scope to answer that. Well, I think that's about it. Before everyone goes, though, I do want to remind you that you can pull the handouts out of the links area. There's also a webinar evaluation. We do take those evaluations very seriously because they help us branding. And I want to give a huge thanks to our speaker today for helping us cover this very dense topic. Like I said, I always learn something new whenever I learn about insurance. I'm getting lots of thanks rolling into the chat, so I think you've truly been appreciated, Kevin. And thanks to Mike for handling the tech. Do you have any last bits of knowledge to pass on along to us, Kevin? No, that is it. Certainly, even if you choose to buy your insurance, there's a local insurance agent that's totally fine. We are a resource, so we help often a lot of people. We don't hesitate to reach out, but we appreciate the opportunity to meet and speak with everybody. Wonderful, thank you. And we should have this recording, the handouts and the presentation up on the Connecting to Collections Care website in the next week or so. So thanks again, and we will see you all in January. Kevin Sullivan.


Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we are going to discuss what of course is in everybody's mind. The news trade which has appeared Omicron with some people of Christianism, oh my God, Kron, that is currently haunting the world again, that we might have a third wave in India and the fourth or fifth wave in many other countries. What is the threat of Omicron? Is it really premature to raise such fears or is it that yes, we need to be prepared this news trade which has potential for causing again further spikes of COVID-19 cases. To discuss this we have with us as we do on Monday or Tuesday. Professor Satyajit Rath. Satyajit, good to have you with us. You are the expert in the sphere of immunology to tell us whether our existing vaccines will work, whether we have enough pool of people who have not been vaccinated already and also what are the possible dangers thereof. We will start first with the possible spread of Omicron as a new variant. So what are the possibilities that we see and is there cause for concern as of now or is there a cause for more than concern, meaning we should start taking steps already? The first thing that all of us need to keep in mind is that there is a great deal that we don't know. So any definitive claims, conclusions and expectations are premature. On the other hand, SARS-CoV-2, the virus and COVID-19, the pandemic disease have taught us over the past two years that abundant caution is a wise policy. So we shouldn't be worrying about this, but we shouldn't be panicking about it. Let's start with what we do know. What we know is here is a virus variant strain that was detected a few days ago in Latin province in South Africa, although the first recorded sample seems to have been a Botswana sample going back a little further. And there are two things that are odd and unusual about this particular variant. Our viewers will recollect that over the past two years, we've discussed regularly that because it's an RNA virus, SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus, every copy has some variation. So there are going to be literally hundreds of thousands of variations popping up and we don't keep reporting each one of these. Why is this a variant of interest and variant of concern? The two reasons. The first is that this particular genetic sequence of the virus strain has an unusually large number of changes. Usually changes are incremental, a few more, a handful here, a handful there. This one seems to have accumulated whether in a human host individual afflicted or perhaps some people have speculated in some animal reservoir, a rather large number of variations. So this is not a descendant of the delta variant, it seems to be a cousin of the delta variant from the sequence. These large number of variations themselves are cause for interest. What converts that into a little more worry is that a lot of these variations are located in the viral spike protein, which is what is involved in both how the virus enters human cells and in how our vaccines currently developed COVID-19 vaccines by and large seem to protect us against the virus. So if the target of the vaccine immune response is changed, then there is at least potential that the virus, this particular strain will evade the vaccine generated immune response. And so for example, the delta variant has just over a dozen changes in the spike protein. This one has more than twice as many. So as soon as we say this, we begin to fall into the binary trap of carelessness versus panic. We ask, so is the vaccine going to work or is it not going to work? And what we need to remember is that the vaccine working is not a yes-no phenomenon. The vaccine will work well, the vaccine will work not so well, but still reasonably the vaccine may work even less well, but still reasonably and so on and so forth. And the odds at this moment, the most likely possibility at this moment that many scientists have pointed to is that the vaccines across the world will work even against this variant, particularly in protecting against severe illness, disease and death, but may not work quite as well. So that's one thing to remember and we'll come back perhaps to what a reasonable policy response could be. But the second property that has made this a variant of concern is that it's been associated with a sudden spurt in case numbers in the province where it was detected. A significant proportion of those cases seem to be of this Omicron variant. And if you very roughly calculate the so-called R value that has been famous these past two years, it seems to be quite high at an approximate estimate of two. This is a very crude estimate. There is no assurance that this is correct, but it does seem to be at least associated with rapid transmission and some of the changes in the sequence are also consistent with the possibility of rapid transmission. So what we seem to have is a virus variant that will spread rapidly and against which vaccine protection may be a little less efficient. Let me take you up on the issue that you've raised that in the province where it was detected, Natal, there seems to be some reason to believe that it is spreading faster than other variants are. And we saw with the Delta variant how quickly it replaced other variants in India. For example, where you had pointed out in one of our discussions, I remember, that how in Punjab and Delhi, it was UK variant initially which was prevalent, but it was overtaken by the Delta variant quite quickly. In fact, in a matter of weeks, Delta variant became even in these two places the dominant variant. So given that, if a differential of say two, which is what it was between the UK and the Delta variant in terms of transmissibility, in fact, less than that, it could replace so quickly. And this is really a geometric progression, therefore the rapidity which it progresses. It means there could be concerns, particularly if there is a large body of people who are not vaccinated. So even if it does work partially, as you said, doesn't lead to serious cases. If there are unvaccinated people and we know whether it is Africa, even South Africa, which is a better record than most other African states, but even in South Africa, the numbers who are have received one shot, not fully vaccinated are still very, very significant, as also in fact in India. So we are looking at possibilities of transmission being rapid, particularly if there is vaccine escape as it is, it may happen. So as you said, no reason to press the panic button, but we need to take precautions. Coming to precautions and I want to get your opinion on that, but maybe later. But could you comment on the possibilities that now exist, particularly because Africa has been left to fend for itself in terms of vaccines and therefore the danger now to the rest of the world, as we have been discussing time and again in this show. So let's all record our appreciation of the black irony involved in this. We have South Africa where on the African continent with an average fully vaccinated population percentage of 6% odd, South Africa has just over 20%. You can imagine what the situation is in the rest of non-South African Africa. India, I remind everybody is just over 30% at the moment of fully vaccinated. Number one, so the majority population is not fully vaccinated by a long shot. Number two, there is a significant proportion of HIV positive individuals undergoing treatment in South Africa and as in many other countries. And it's clear that HIV infected individuals are a little more at risk of developing chronic long-term SARS-CoV-2 infection, where the virus can undergo a fair number of selection processes within the body. So that's a second issue. And yet, unlike many other countries of the global South, including India, South Africa from day one has had one of the world's most outstanding SARS-CoV-2 tracking processes and systems driven by their experiences with HIV driven by the interaction that they've set up between public health in the community on the one hand and molecular biology laboratories on the other hand, which is why they find the viruses, the new strains that keep cropping up. And as they've pointed out, you're not giving us vaccines, we are giving you information in real time. And the only response we get, some of them have said, is that we are penalized by being blocked off in travel restrictions from the rest of the country. The layers of Black irony involved in this and the sheer inadequacy of inclusive, meaningful public health responses at the global level involved in this need to be appreciated as an object lesson by all of us. So that's one issue. Transmissibility has two layers. One is, is it transmissible in unvaccinated population? And as you point out, it's quite likely that it is going to be transmissive. Even if vaccines don't work as well, transmission amongst the vaccinated is still going to be a little bit lower. But the really crucial question that we don't have an answer to, we again, simply have anecdotal evidence about is just how much of severe illness is going to result from a Omicron, because of which large numbers of people will land up in hospitals and tertiary hospital healthcare systems will be overwhelmed if there are large numbers. And you'll appreciate that if total numbers of infections go up, but the proportion of severe illness goes down, then we are still not as bad. Is that the case? Is it not the case? The only thing we know so far is what is widely circulated in public discourse is a set of comments by Dr. Susan Cotsy, who's the, I think the president of the South African Medical Association, who's pointed out that all the Omicron variant COVID-19 cases that they are seeing seem to be milder than other COVID-19 variant illnesses. They have other interesting nuanced differences as well, but by and large, her court seems to suggest that they are mild. Is this real evidence? No, it's not because it's anecdotal. So we need to wait and see. But that's the one thing that we have to say that even if case numbers increase, total infection numbers increase, cases landing up in hospitals may not increase at the same rate. We need to put all of this together when we formulate policy. Policy does therefore have to be extremely nuanced in response to this. Numbers double in terms of infections and only half land up in hospitals as a proportion. We still will get larger numbers. So we have to see what is the rate of increase as opposed to the rate of people landing up in hospitals. And this is also something that we need to track, not just simply infections or not simply people landing up in hospitals, but both. Because that will, according to you, give us a better handle and what should be the public health response. At the moment, as you point out, apart from putting in a faster vaccination rate, particularly for Africa, which is going to be the storm center, so to say of this new COVID-19 infections, because large parts of Africa are well below South Africa's level of vaccination. Given that, obviously, the rest of the world has to prepare, let us face it, any kind of isolation is not going to work. The virus is already out there and if it is more transmissible as it appears to be, it cannot be contained. This is our past experience. Whoever has tried to isolate and so on, unless they can follow the rigor with which the Chinese seem to be doing a zero COVID policy, I don't think this is really possible for most other countries. Given that, back to masks and social distancing, at least as a immediate measure. Absolutely. And again, an object lesson in this is something that biomedical scientists have been crying in the wilderness for months now, that we need to not let our policies, our cultural norms about physical distancing down at all. We need to be maintaining those because protection against transmission by those means is strain insensitive. It is strain-independent. It will protect against all strains and this is important to remember. And it reminds me of quotes that repeatedly come out which point out that even some of the drugs may not work as well against a micron. And I was wondering which drugs are people talking about and then it suddenly dawned on me with a little bit more reading that what people are talking about as drugs is the monoclonal antibodies from Russian Regeneron, which of course will quite possibly not work as hotently against a micron, exactly the same way that vaccines won't work because both are antibody-based. But the bulk of the drugs that we are talking about, molnupiravir from Merck, which incidentally may not be quite as effective as originally claimed but is still not too bad, and paxilovid from Pfizer, those should work quite well. And yet we are conflating antibody responses. We are conflating strain-specific efforts with non-strain-specific efforts such as masking. We really, really, really need to make masks and a certain measure of caution in physical distancing our cultural norm for a while and a while yet. Even the fact that every winter in North America, winter and in the rainy season in South Asia, we find other vaccines which are airborne, aerosol-based, also causing infections. Anyway, masking when people are having or sneezing, etc., around you or you yourself, masking is a very good idea. Particularly, I have an asthmatic as I have been saying in the shows and I have found that my asthma has shown remarkable improvement in the last two years because others are masking as well as me. So that is for a, shall we say, a sample size of one what I have been able to observe. But coming back to the point you raised again on the issue of medicines and we're running out of time but I still want a short response from you. So quick response should be therefore the antiviral drug should be really bulk produced across the world. And this is an urgent requirement that we have and vaccination rates need to be increased and examination whether of new vaccines which I'm told are very simple to do with the current platform that we have built, introduce new vaccines to protect against the new strains is also possible to do very quickly. So could you give us a quick answer on these two possibilities so that we can end with some hope? So drugs, as I said, the molupiravir from Merck and Paxlavid from Pfizer possibilities are going to be very easy to mass produce and to distribute in a matter of months, if not weeks. New vaccines, even tweaked vaccines are going to take time that's much significantly longer simply because there are regulatory approvals that we cannot and should not be riding rough shot over. So that's not going to come before at the earliest February or March of next year, even the most rapid vaccine platforms. By that time what the micron based situation if at all might be the world over remains anybody's guess at the moment. Drugs certainly clearly are a possibility and should be mass produced. We've been saying that on this forum for quite some time and I go back at the end again and again to masking and I remind everybody of the other issue that we've been raising on this platform which is sustainable, high quality, N95 level, biodegradable, accessible, cheap masks for people and communities of the global south have not been a global priority, have not been a national priority in almost any country in the world and this I think is thrown up in stark relief as a public health lacuna by the emergence of a micron just as it was by the emergence of the Delta variant. And just to finish what Satyajit has said as a public good all this viral, virus, drugs, antivirals, sorry, all these antiviral vaccines and masks, high quality masks as public good. This is the need of the hour. Thank you very much for listening to us on NewsClick and also do visit our website.