The trouble is that the permanent powers wouldn't just be for covid. That is a key point the consultation makes. The SG at the moment rely on the UK covid act for various things, and while that can be extended for as long as covid is an issue, once it isn't needed, the provisions in it won't apply.
So (as far as I can tell... It's hardly the most clearly written document/ consultation paper) they want to take the provisions in the UK act (and the various Scottish legislation deriving from that where the issues are devolved - like education, public health etc) and develop new Scottish legislation to be able to use those powers even if covid isn't the reason. Some would be only "triggered" by a pandemic/ public health issue, and others are just generally "nice things" that covid has let us do like public meetings on Zoom, that weren't allowed in the existing legislation.
I imagine there will be more issues with some proposals than others! The limitation on evictions, for example, of course is very nice, and appropriate for when people had lost their income and therefore feared for their home. There are of course already safeguards in place so it is very hard for a landlord to evict a tenant - which I don't pretend to understand the details of - but there surely has to be a limit to that! Otherwise people could get a tenancy with no intention of paying rent, with the landlord having no recourse to get their property back. Who would rent out their property on that basis?! So any permanent power can't be a block ban on evictions, but could maybe take into account the tenant having a temporary loss or drop of income, and give a bit of legal protection in that case? In any case, it would need to be worked through by experts and stakeholders, and I don't think rushing it through by keeping the existing temporary power just because we have it, is the right way to go about it.
On the closure of schools - I'm not convinced by the explanation that unis, private schools, nurseries etc weren't covered pre covid, so they need more powers to be able to close them. Even if they weren't "schools" as such, they were definitely covered by restrictions placed on businesses, so in practice (and as accepted in the consultation), these places did close - whether or not as a result of the Covid legislation specifically (the document seems to say that the SG didn't have to "trigger" the UK act in practice but the non state sector closed voluntarily, presumably as they thought it necessary - though as I say, the consultation doc doesn't make easy reading... Paras 21/ 22 if anyone else can decipher it! ) . I don't see why the same wouldn't apply to other diseases/ infections. If PHS told a uni or private school there was an outbreak of legionnaires or something, and they had to do x, y and z, including close to students, they wouldn't be exempt from that just because they weren't state schools. I may be misunderstanding the proposals, but using the nature of the education as a reason, really seems a red herring.