  The effort for combating the COVID-19 pandemic around the world has resulted
in a huge amount of data, e.g., from testing, contact tracing, modelling,
treatment, vaccine trials, and more. In addition to numerous challenges in
epidemiology, healthcare, biosciences, and social sciences, there has been an
urgent need to develop and provide visualisation and visual analytics (VIS)
capacities to support emergency responses under difficult operational
conditions. In this paper, we report the experience of a group of VIS
volunteers who have been working in a large research and development consortium
and providing VIS support to various observational, analytical,
model-developmental and disseminative tasks. In particular, we describe our
approaches to the challenges that we have encountered in requirements analysis,
data acquisition, visual design, software design, system development, team
organisation, and resource planning. By reflecting on our experience, we
propose a set of recommendations as the first step towards a methodology for
developing and providing rapid VIS capacities to support emergency responses.
