Provincial health officers are career civil servants, not communicators, and most had never given a televised briefing before this year. Several now do one every day.

The cost of daily visibility

The role demands something the training never covered: explaining uncertainty repeatedly, in public, while the underlying advice changes. Getting that tone wrong in either direction erodes the compliance the advice depends on.

What has worked is unglamorous. Plain sentences, published data, and an explicit admission when a recommendation has been revised and why.

The offices will return to obscurity eventually. The question is whether the public trust built in the meantime survives the return.