BERMUDA'S DOCKWORKERS FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE

Last modified: September 20. 2006 10:21AM

Avian flu: Coping with a pandemic

By Roger Crombie

Bermuda’s dockworkers could become the Island’s most important citizens in the wake of a pandemic such as the avian flu. That was the opinion yesterday of Dr. Graham Sher, the chief executive officer of Canadian Blood Services, the company that manages Canada’s blood supply.
Dr. Sher was speaking on the morning of the second day of the Bermuda Captive Conference being held at the Fairmont Southampton Hotel. Dr. Sher had been selected to speak on a panel addressing preparedness for a pandemic because his company has a Bermuda captive, without which, he said last year, Canada could not manage its blood supply.
“Most experts believe that the threat of a pandemic is real and imminent, while others claim it will fizzle out,” Dr. Sher said. He forecast that in an outbreak of flu similar to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, “absenteeism from work might be in the range of 20 to 50 percent for as much as six to eight weeks for each phase of the pandemic.” The World Health Organisation, he said, forecast two or three such waves over a 36-week period. “With three months between the waves, a pandemic such as this would last eight months,” he said.
A rapt audience of about 100 people was told that a pandemic was “inevitable, but not imminent”, by fellow panellist Colin Rainier, managing director of Hannover Life Re. Using the 1918 flu outbreak as an example of what might happen sooner or later, Mr. Rainier said: “The life insurance industry is really not worried about epidemics, but we should be very, very concerned about pandemics.”
He said that “our industry has $250 billion in capital – not assets, but reserves set aside to meet this sort of thing – and a routine flu epidemic tends to (result in claims) that cost us about $9.5 billion in losses.
An event such as the Spanish Flu, were it to occur today, would cost six and a quarter times as much, which would be about $109 billion. That’s less than half the capital the industry has in hand.”
Mr. Rainier praised Bermuda’s reinsurance sector. He pointed out that there are “more than a thousand life insurers, but only about a dozen life reinsurers.”
Two, Scottish Re Group and Wilton Re, are Bermuda-based, although several other Bermuda companies have life insurance and reinsurance operations.
The third panellist, Mark Baker, is head of global markets at HSBC, having transferred to Bermuda from New York. He ran down the scenario of how the financial markets might cope with a pandemic.
“The markets are incredibly flexible and good at adapting,” he said, “but economic activity could severely decline. Investments may be postponed. Asset prices and operational disruptions are the two main areas of concern.” Mr. Baker forecast that although “cash would be popular, as would gold”, the markets would survive a pandemic similar to the 1918 flu outbreak.
An audience member asked how Dr. Sher thought Bermuda might deal with the effects of a pandemic, particularly if the US suffered from disruption and the Bermuda food supply were threatened as a result.
In response, Dr. Sher said: “I think it would force the Bermuda Government to look at its workforce.
Dockworkers would become more important than bankers; in fact they might become the most important citizens. In preparing for pandemics, organisations have to look right down to the front line and determine the weak links in the system.”