Let’s get a few things out of the way. First, I am not a data scientist or an actuary. I am an attorney interested in data. More specifically, I am interested in using data from disparate sources to understand how the insurance world is changing.Executive SummaryThis article is the first of a series from RiskGenius Co-Founder and CEO Chris Cheatham about COVID-19 insurance litigation. Here, he looks at data to investigate the correlation between infection rates and lawsuit counts by state and in aggregate across the nation.
Part 1 of a series: COVIDigation Nation
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a slow-motion horror story for the United States. As I write this, COVID-19 cases and deaths are increasing. This pandemic has also served as a fascinating opportunity to study legal and regulatory decisions as they are applied to a once-in-a-lifetime (hopefully) global crisis.
Carrier Management has agreed to publish a series of articles I am writing about COVID-19 insurance litigation. I call it COVIDigation. In these articles, I will share insights gleaned from lawsuits, regulations and other data sources related to COVID-19 and insurance. Bryan Wilson is my statistical muse in this endeavor and helped me create the data visualizations and edit the text. Thank you also to the New York Times COVID-19 dataset and Penn Law’s COVID Coverage Litigation Tracker for supplying data for this initial article. (Data from The New York Times, based on reports from state and local health agencies, is also summarized on The New York Times U.S. tracking page at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html.)