A rough summary:
COVID response benefits from good information—and lots of the needed information is spread over many institutions, people, etc. It is beneficial to have up to date, accurate, and local data—this is hard.
COVID responses often involve/benefit from coordination across many different institutions/people/domains. This is hard.
COVID responses may benefit from extreme measures long after “corona fatigue” has set in and people and decision makers are sick of hearing about it, and just want things to “go back to normal”
Many people will need to make decisions about what to do as a result of / to respond to COVID. “Can you imagine conducting planning for an urban school district? A company with offices in multiple time zones? A company with a supply chain? A person responsible for industrial safety of a facility whose physical footprint includes one or more enclosed pockets of air?”
Many/most of these people don’t have training or experience in making decisions like this.
There will be lots of contexts where decisions are made related to COVID where the expected value delta between a great decision and a bad one will be big, which gives big opportunity for positive impact in helping all the people who will be making COVID related/influenced decisions and response plans make *better* decisions/response plans
It seems that if COVID causes long term fatigue (has been speculated but no strong evidence that I’m aware of) this could be negative for the EA community—i.e. if leaders of EA related orgs or key employees or other key EA contributors had fatigue issues and lower personal output, that seems bad.