When your wider industry is both a provider of services AND the principal source of scientific advice on the rules that should govern the safe operation of those services, you’re in a quite a privileged position.
You have to be careful to avoid scaremongering – you might unnecessarily damage your own industry. You have to avoid burying bad news – you might put people at risk.
It means that in comparison to others, you probably have to be much more public than most about the advice you’re getting, giving, creating, synthesizing and applying.
Double all of that if you’re a charity, and triple it if your brand involves keeping people safe or educating the young. It’s why the safeguarding scandals in the development sector a couple of years ago were so potent with the public.
Our sector creates and employs scientists. Some of them are epidemiologists, and virologists, and public health specialists. They advise the government on things – including the reopening of campuses.
Government can then follow or ignore (and more subtly, synthesize) the advice it gets when creating public health guidance for universities.
Universities then say “we’re following public health guidance for universities”. But what if universities disagree with the government’s call?
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