Insurance companies will likely spend significant portions of their first-quarter earnings calls to discuss how they plan to offset the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

With the stock market still volatile as dire economic forecasts and rising infection counts dominate the headlines, CFRA Equity Research analyst Sel Hardy said investors are looking for "concrete steps" companies are taking to cut costs and find remedies for the income losses, with "leverage and liquidity" among their major concerns.

"Investors would like to hear how companies are managing their liquidity, servicing their debt and working capital needs going forward," Hardy said in an email to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

As far as the content of those calls, Piper Sandler analyst Paul Newsome said they will be "complex" and cover many topics, but executives may be reluctant to talk about politically sensitive industry issues affected by the pandemic, such as business interruption claims.

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"I would imagine they'll say very little, because they don't want to spoil the situation from a political perspective," Newsome said in an interview. "I think investors want to hear that there's some sort of way to estimate what the exposure will be for all of these issues that we're seeing."

Newsome said those issues fall into two categories, the first of which he called "obvious" claims. Those include medical malpractice and general liability related to companies affected by the pandemic, as well as business interruption claims that do not fall under the pandemic exclusion.

The second issue is the political atmosphere surrounding business interruption claims from the pandemic that carriers might be forced to pay despite specific policy exclusions for disease outbreaks.

"That's going to be a harder one for companies and investors to quantify," Newsome said.

Hardy said a number of managed care insurers have been warning investors about how COVID-19 has affected their ledgers through public disclosures or by cutting their first-quarter EPS estimates. Year-over-year comparisons will not mean much right now, she said.

"Instead of looking at growth, we will be looking to see whether the companies were able to limit and manage the impact of revenue decline," she added.

Cigna Corp. and Humana Inc. will likely talk about their decisions to waive cost sharing and co-pays for COVID-19 testing and treatments; UnitedHealth Group Inc., Anthem Inc. and Centene Corp. have made similar moves. Hardy said those extra expenses could be offset in the short term by people avoiding hospitals for tests and treatments related unrelated to the novel coronavirus. The impact beyond the first quarter "depends on how long the crisis will last and how the numbers of hospitalized patients evolve," she said.

All of this is uncharted territory for property and casualty carriers as well, said Piper Sandler's Newsome, who likens the pandemic to a hurricane-like catastrophe that has come ashore and is still doing damage.

"We really don't know how to set the reserves because we just don't know how long people are going to be out of work, or how many people will be seriously hurt or even die from this event," he said. "So, until you know, you're not going to be able to have an enormous amount of certainty around the reserves you're going to sell."