There aren’t a lot of ways the COVID-19 pandemic has made our lives more convenient. The pandemic is reshaping life insurance and for the better! One small change: The way we shop for life insurance.

Faced with increasing demand, insurance companies have labored to make buying life insurance quicker and easier. Many of these improvements, such as a more virtual approval process, which are likely to last into 2021 and beyond, have been made without necessarily raising the premiums for life insurance coverage — at least yet.

Not that the news is all good for life insurance shoppers. The coronavirus has complicated getting a policy, at least for certain types of customer. Some insurers have imposed tighter underwriting guidelines on applicants with pre-existing health conditions, on seniors, and on those who have recently traveled outside the U.S.

Still, here are three upsides to life insurance that can be credited to a disease that’s taken more than 300,000 American lives, and whose impact continues to intensify. We’ve also suggested steps you can take to capitalize on these improvements.

More Americans are getting insured.

One grim truth of the COVID pandemic is that more and more Americans have realized they need life insurance.

The number of Americans saying they felt a heightened need for life insurance rose from 49% earlier in the year to 58% in the third quarter, according to insurance research company LIMRA. And people acted on that awareness, LIMRA reports, by buying 10% more term-life policies (the most common life insurance type by far) this summer than in 2019 — the largest sales surge in 18 years.

Some of that interest comes from those seeking to insure other loved ones. More people than before are opting to insure their spouses, and even their kids, as well as themselves. We now see a father or mother contact us and want to cover as much of the family as they can.

You may be able to e-sign

If you’ve signed official documents recently, chances are good that you did so electronically, rather than mailing signed originals or even sending images of the pages you signed. Yet many life and health insurers weren’t yet accepting such esignatures, at least early in the pandemic. As the volume of applications picked up in the spring, we and other brokers “leaned hard” on the companies who were holdouts for the use of tools such as DocuSignTake. The result is a big change due to COVID….that you can complete an application that was once all paper within minutes, due largely to more insurers accepting electronic signatures.

You may no longer need a medical exam

Early in the pandemic, it became easier for many other people to acquire insurance without the inconvenience of a medical exam. Restrictions on face-to-face meetings forced insurance companies to discontinue in-person medical exams, an important requirement for many life insurance applications. (The exams have now returned, albeit with masked examiners.)

“No exam” offerings have been expanded, too.

But life insurance policies that require no exams are traditionally more expensive than those that do, because the insurer assumed a higher risk of death by the applicant. The absence of an exam also often results in a lower maximum death benefit — in the hundreds of thousands, rather than the million dollars or more that many applicants seek — again due to higher perceived risk. (Source: AP News)