It is Important to Know Everything About Your Insurance Policy

Video Transcribed: This is Oklahoma Marijuana Attorney Isaiah Brydie coming at you with another video, and this video is going to be all about insurance and the coronavirus. Specifically, if your business can claim, can actually file an insurance claim due to the coronavirus a.k.a COVID-19 epidemic that’s going on in the nation right now.

The short answer is, it depends on what your insurance policy says. The long answer is, obviously a lot longer. So, getting straight into it. Most general business insurance policies are not going to be able to cover any business’ loss during this crisis that the nation is currently facing, particularly because most insurance policies reacquire a physical loss for the business.

Now, a lot of courts have a lot of things going on when defining what “physical loss” is, but generally, “physical loss” could be understand as a situation which makes the property uninhabitable or otherwise unfit for its intended use, which then will trigger the “physical loss” characteristic for the insurance policy.

There is an argument to be made, depending on your business, that if there was an individual that was infected or could have potentially been infected by the COVID-19 virus on the premises of your business, or if you have high traffic and things like that, there is an argument to be made that that situation has led to your business being contaminated by the virus, therefore, unfit for its intended use because you had to shut your business down.

Obviously that is a really, really big can of worms to dive into, especially when we start talking about liability of your business. That’s something that we’re going to have to see play out a little bit more to see it develop. Going on from there, there are some more specialized insurance, and also too, insurance and extensions that you can get for your business insurance that may help you in this situation.

There are some extensions, for example, for communicable or infectious diseases. There are some specialized insurances for when a civil authority decides to shut down a particular business or businesses in general.

There are a lot of different insurance policies out there. It’s really going to depend on what your policy itself says in its guidelines and its wordings.

Additionally, there are also some insurance policies that control for when foreign nations shut down business activities so that the U.S. businesses can control for any losses that they may incur from foreign nations activities.

So, it’s really going to depend on what your insurance says on this matter, and we’ll go on and see how things are developing from there. Going on from there, now, it’s really important that we talk about liability insurance.