Apropos of nothing in particular, here's how different professions fared during the early days of the pandemic. This is from 2020, so it's pre-vaccination.
35 thoughts on “Raw data: COVID death rates in different professions”
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Cats, charts, and politics
Computers for the win! Huzzah to being in the industry with the least social interaction of all!
Though to be fair, it doesn't look as though "blogger" is considered a separate profession...
And they are the youngest of the professions.
Interesting that farming has such a high death rate. Presumably a huge percentage of them just never took any precautions at all or bothered to get vaccinated and thought it was something far, far away.
Cough:
And, the average farmer was somewhere between 58.1 (2022) and 57.5 (2017) years old in 2020: https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/Census22_HL_FarmProducers_FINAL.pdf
I wonder what percentage of the "farming" population were (are) low paid non-skilled workers living in cramped quarters during planting and harvest seasons.
Yeah, that's what did it here. Santa Cruz despite being expensive and wealthy most of the county is devoted to farming and getting protective gear and testing to farm workers was difficult.
They don't have good safety nets for isolating or accessing medical care or supplies.
They often don't have access to even handwashing or toilets, either, which in this day and age of portapotties is shameful.
I stand corrected.
That's more about what happened to police officers; so many refused to use personal protective equipment.
So weird, right? They won’t go out the door without their gun and bullet proof vest but they refuse to wear a mask and get vaccinated. According to this web site 501 police officers died of Covid in 2021. That’s about as many as died of gunshot wounds for about 10 years.
https://www.odmp.org/search/year?year=2021
Exactly.
And about as many died from 2000-2015
Wingnuts can only deal with imaginary threats or they get too panicky.
I expect deaths in farming weren't farmers but migrant laborers picking fruit and other harvesting jobs living 20 to a shack. Greenhouse workers would have also been devastated.
Ah yes, I remember when blaming the victim was considered declasse.
I remember when ignoring someone touching fire and getting burned would come with 'how can we avoid touching fire with our hands' rather than 'how dare you blame them for getting burned!'.
So, the education bar makes me think it was a good Idea to shut the schools until teachers could get vaxd. Here in Oregon they were head of queue just behind clinical healthcare
Shh... educators should've thrown caution to the wind and kept on providing free daycare* to working parents, at least until 5x more died from covid like braver/ignorant/unlucky policemen and security personnel did. Freedom isn't free, teachers... we could've used more of you laying down your lives so that parents wouldn't have to deal with their own kids all day long.
*Whatever they were doing, the teachers in even "free" states like Florida that barely closed schools at all saw kids fall behind in learning objectives at rates comparable to elsewhere... so the only service unionized teachers denied society at large (by refusing to return to the classroom until vaccinations were widespread) was babysitting. apparently.
If you've been following the literature, it's now been well established that covid infection reduced IQ and the more severe the symptoms, the greater the loss of IQ.
If you cross tab this with age and social distancing and nasking norms for each profession, I expect that the lessons are abundantly clear. We will, of course, resolutely refuse to learn any of those lessons and instead rely on our own prjudices and one or two unreliable anecdotes.
Social distancing wasn't possible for many of those professions, either, which complicates things. But yes.
I was not trying to imply blame (at least not on the individuals involved). But we need to understand that it worked, and that government and employers can protect their employees better next time.
I wonder how this compares to life expectancy outside of the pandemic. Some professions are associated with higher rates of poor health, which would certainly make you more vulnerable to covid.
Those death rates above 40% seem way too high, may make more sense that most of those groups never reported cases unless they got serious and/or went to hospital. 60% of police/security is not believable by any stretch.
The graph is showing deaths/100,000, so 60/100,000 is not 60%.
Exactly.
It's 0.06%
Thanks, not sure how I missed the per 100K thing, still think certain professions less likely to go to doctor/hospital unless emergency (so reporting artifact), and overall given this is per 100K not much significant differences overall IMO.
Maybe I'm looking to confirm my priors, but seems there's a inverse relationship between the average education levels of these professions and their death rates.
Comparing computers with science or engineering seems to disprove this.
My first impression was similar. It seems being closer to the sciences (and trusting them) and getting or receiving education led to better outcomes. If so I would expect data after vaccinations started to show an even greater disparity. I
probably also something of a relationship between average education levels of these professions and the the ability to work from home and/or have good health care.
Overall, if the difference in numbers is deemed significant when factoring in reporting inconsistencies, what is the theory behind it?
Obviously a profession that skews largely older would be one (and then not really about the profession), higher viral load due to more exposure to the virus would be one (but the professions don't seem to cluster along these lines, especially construction, though the lowest morbidity does appear to be cubicle workers whi could more easily work remotely), and socioeconomic/cultural context could play a role (reluctance to seek out medical care, communal living, etc.).
Overall the ability to work in isolation and/or remotely looks like the most likely factor.
How about a parallel chart showing distribution of political party memberships among the same occupations. Jes’ thinking’.
Yay, it killed far more of the lower classes, those people who were called "essential workers" and had to go in to work anyway! Win-win!!
/s, yes
This is fascinating data. Probably important to keep in mind is that this is the ultimate outcome in terms of deaths. The inherent risk associated with a job is only one component of the total deaths rate. Clearly, for computer jobs, it is very likely that these people could do their work remotely and that protected them. But health workers were directly exposed to sick people regularly and yet their death rates falls below the average. So, the **behavior** and **safety practices** of those workers must have counterbalanced the risk of their job significantly. At the other end of the spectrum, police and security show the highest death rates. True, their job might have exposed them to some sick people and this may be one reason, but surely health workers were systematically more exposed could counterbalance this risk. So one possible explanation is that **behavior** and **safety practices** of police were inadequate, which makes sense when one recalls that they quickly adopted the MAGA refrains that this whole thing about safety measures with respect to covid was garbage.
If I remember at least one of the years more police died of covid than violence in the line of duty.