COVID-19 has caused 100s of millions of infections and millions of deaths worldwide, overwhelming health and economic capacities in many countries and at multiple scales. The immediacy and magnitude of this crisis has resulted in government officials, practitioners and applied scholars turning to reflexive learning exercises to generate insights for managing the reverberating effects of this disease as well as the next inevitable pandemic. We contribute to both tasks by assessing COVID-19 as a “super wicked” problem denoted by four features we originally formulated to describe the climate crisis: time is running out, no central authority, those causing the problem also want to solve it, and policies irrationally discount the future (Levin et al. in Playing it forward: path dependency, progressive incrementalism, and the “super wicked” problem of global climate change, 2007; Levin et al. in Playing it forward: Path dependency, progressive incrementalism, and the "super wicked" problem of global climate change, 2009; Levin et al. in Policy Sci 45(2):123–152, 2012). Doing so leads us to identify three overarching imperatives critical for pandemic management. First, similar to requirements to address the climate crisis, policy makers must establish and maintain durable policy objectives. Second, in contrast to climate, management responses must always allow for swift changes in policy settings and calibrations given rapid and evolving knowledge about a particular disease’s epidemiology. Third, analogous to, but with swifter effects than climate, wide-ranging global efforts, if well designed, will dramatically reduce domestic costs and resource requirements by curbing the spread of the disease and/or fostering relevant knowledge for managing containment and eradication. Accomplishing these tasks requires building the analytic capacity for engaging in reflexive anticipatory policy design exercises aimed at maintaining, or building, life-saving thermostatic institutions at the global and domestic levels.

COVID-19 已在全球造成数以亿计的感染和数百万人的死亡，在许多国家和多个规模上压倒了健康和经济能力。这场危机的紧迫性和严重性导致政府官员、从业者和应用学者转向反思性学习练习，以产生管理这种疾病的反响效应以及下一次不可避免的流行病的见解。我们通过将 COVID-19 评估为“超级邪恶”问题来为这两项任务做出贡献，该问题由我们最初为描述气候危机而制定的四个特征表示：时间不多了，没有中央权威，导致问题的人也想解决它，以及政策不合理地打折未来（Levin 等人在 Playing it forward: path dependency,progressive incrementalism 中，以及全球气候变化的“超级邪恶”问题，2007；莱文等人。在向前推进：路径依赖、渐进主义和全球气候变化的“超级邪恶”问题，2009；莱文等人。政策科学 45(2):123–152, 2012)。这样做使我们确定了对大流行管理至关重要的三个首要任务。首先，与应对气候危机的要求类似，政策制定者必须建立并维持持久的政策目标。其次，与气候相比，鉴于对特定疾病流行病学的快速和不断发展的知识，管理层的反应必须始终允许政策设置和校准的迅速变化。第三，类似于气候变化，但影响比气候变化更快，如果设计得当，广泛的全球努力将通过遏制疾病的传播和/或培养管理遏制和根除的相关知识来显着降低国内成本和资源需求。完成这些任务需要建立分析能力，以参与旨在在全球和国内层面维持或建立拯救生命的恒温机构的反思性预期政策设计练习。