Customized COVID-19 risk analysis as a high value area

Abstract

At the moment, I think that many effective altruists are spending a lot of their time doing COVID risk analyses part-time. This is for a couple of reasons: people in the EA community are more likely to have the kind of disposition that makes you want to dig into the research on COVID-19, and many EAs live in housing situations that are not always accounted for in the current recommendations (e.g. many live in the bay area where there are a lot of group houses).There are a couple of major downsides of people doing this work themselves: it’s time-costly, and it is mentally draining and stressful. It’s also wasteful if a lot of this analysis work ends up getting replicated privately across many people.