| Over the past few months, we've experienced an economic catastrophe as the country has shut down to prevent Covid-19 from spreading out of control. Shuttered businesses have led to weekly floods of newly unemployed. In April alone, 20.5 million people lost their jobs. People can't pay their rent. Endless lines form at food pantries. It is wretched. Now, imagine that corporations had an insurance policy that paid out in case of a pandemic. Maybe they could have continued to employ some of those workers. Maybe their outlook would not have been quite so grim. Here's the thing: Such insurance existed. We're not talking here about typical business-interruption insurance. Those policies generally fail to cover or deliberately exclude pandemics, which were thought to be too infrequent and too unpredictable to quantify and therefore impossible to insure against. But a company called Munich Re, one of the world's biggest reinsurers, teamed up with a renowned virologist, and they figured out how to manage the risk and create a market for pandemic insurance. They even started selling the insurance—a year and a half before the novel coronavirus appeared in China. So, did anyone buy it? And if they had, would they be in better shape as a result? Evan Ratliff, a longtime contributor to WIRED, answers that question in this month's cover story. "This Is Nathan Wolfe. We Should Have Listened to Him." Vera Titunik, Features Editor | 
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