According to Jo Grady of the University and College Union, universities risk becoming the ‘care homes of the second wave’ unless students defy the government’s attempt to get them back in face-to-face education. She went on to claim that a return to campus ‘risks doing untold damage to people’s health and exacerbating the worst public health crisis of our lifetimes’ and could lead to a ‘silent avalanche of infections’.
Are these fears justified, or are they an attempt by the union to get its members out of having to do any work (while presumably collecting their salaries)? Any large number of people getting together and mixing from across the country risks some spreading of an infectious disease. But what made care homes especially lethal places in the early stages of the Covid-19 outbreak was not that care home residents were especially likely to catch the disease – we have no good data on this because there was a lack of testing both inside and outside care homes – but that they were particularly vulnerable to dying from the disease if they did catch it.
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