Truly shocking stats from the Office of National Statistics (ONS).

[ZuzusPetaIs]

Have a look at this graph, published recently by the ONS - an official government body would no incentive to lie

@ShootsFruitAndLeaves
Thanks for your post as it does answer the question in my post somewhat.

The only question I would add is why would you expect teacher deaths from pre-lockdown infections to peak so soon when the overall national peak was later than the 3rd April? School closures pretty much coincided with national lockdown so wouldn't we expect them to follow a similar curve to everyone else (possible excluding care homes)?

100,000 people not people working in that profession.

As I said, its really not entirely clear.

It's entirely clear if you don't read poorly written articles by barely literate Grauniad journalists but instead look at the source

www.ons.gov.uk/releases/covid19relateddeathsbyoccupationenglandandwalesdeathsregistereduptoandincluding20thapril2020

It is per 100,000 workers. Even if the number of workers is smaller than 100,000.

Thats why an error bar is supplied, because it's not necessarily certain that a higher rate is more than bad luck.

Expect teachers and school support staff to rise now. Not that that will bother most people on here.

it is per 100 000 of the particular occupation but yes not clear from that graph.

Is it? Thank you. The article, that op says explains it, talks about 100,000 of the population.

It still confuses the data. Theres not 100,000 people work in my industry. We are the largest operator and there's 4 other small ones. We have had one death. Very sadly caught from his wife who was a nurse. Theres about 5k people in this industry. So our number would be worked out at 20 per 100,000.

We had people furloughed for 3 weeks and are mainly back now. But 20 per 100,000 isn't reflective.

We don't really fall into any of theose categories. No idea where it puts us, or how our numbers contributen to other employment groups.

it is actually EXTREMELY difficult to draw some of the concusions poeple are suggesting form this data alone.
As has already been stated there is absolutely nothing that looks at confounding factors ie - other factors which may contribute to death and may be more associated with certain occupations.
Now before anyone slates me - we are talking statistics her so all of what I am about to say is based on generalisations and not individuals and I would never make assumptions about an individual based on their occupation BUT
One of the highest rates of death is on male elementary workers, and specifically security workers. It is possible there may be other health and lifestyle factors common among this group that may contribute to them having a higher risk.
This may be the case for any group where possible associated lifestyle and health indiciators that would statistically be more common in that group will either raise or lower their chance of death

Also, and importantly, these figures are for ALL deaths in this group, not just those CAUSED by COVID - basically anoyon who has died who has been tested for COVID whether that test was positive or negative as stated in the notes on the ONS site:

"Deaths involving the coronavirus (COVID-19) include those with an underlying cause, or any mention, of U07.1 (COVID-19, virus identified) or U07.2 (COVID-19, virus not identified)."

It is therefore impossible to take these figures and extrapolate them to suggest that their occupation itself was responsible for their higher or lower risk of death, which is what the guardian and lots of others are trying to do.

It's entirely clear if you don't read poorly written articles by barely literate Grauniad journalists but instead look at the source

Yes and I was referencing what the op was referring to.

Are you always this arsey, to people have a discussion?

Common fucking sense it's related to your working environment the more your role includes contact with other people the higher the risk.

nothing to do with poor/rich

You don’t see any link between working environment and how rich you are?

The shocking part is how much more susceptible men are to this disease.

But that's not shocking, we've known that since before lockdown along with BAME deaths being high, obesity being a factor and now diabetes a chart by occupation is pretty meaningless unless all members of a particular occupation have the same health issues and lifestyles imo

also, interestingly they used only 882 recorded deaths, and in fact only 82% of thse that had occupation recorded to generate all this data so that is a relatively small sample size to make such massive extrapolations from!

rwalker if that was the case and it was that simple then surely healthcare workers,some of whom are working on wards FULL of COVID positive patients all day would be higher up the death rates then?

Sorry beg pardon, there are in fact raw death counts

www.ons.gov.uk/file?uri=%2fpeoplepopulationandcommunity%2fhealthandsocialcare%2fcausesofdeath%2fdatasets%2fcoronaviruscovid19relateddeathsbyoccupationenglandandwales%2fcurrent/covid19byoccupationreferencetablesfinal10052020145723.xlsx

At table 2

Professional occupations (code 2) has 127 covid-19 deaths for men, 97 for women

Table 3 breaks that code 2 down, and you have

Teaching and educational professionals (code 23)

This is sub-divided into 9 categories

Higher education teaching professionals
Further education teaching professionals
Secondary education teaching professionals
Primary and nursery education teaching professionals
Special needs education teaching professionals
Senior professionals of educational establishments
Education advisers and school inspectors
Teaching and other educational professionals n.e.c.

The full population size by SOC code is here

www.nomisweb.co.uk/datasets/aps168/reports/employment-by-occupation?compare=K04000001 (do filter by country to E&W if not done so already)

If you look at table 8 you can see in particular:

330,000 female primary school teachers of which only 6 died (2 per 100k or something)
222k female secondary teachers of which 6 died (less than 3 per 100k)

For men it was MUCH higher, 11 out of 132k secondary school teachers, although only 1 out of 57k primary school techers. However you would need to look at the age profile of male secondary teachers to adjust this properly. Note that 11 out of 130k is still below average risk for men.

So female school teachers died in numbers roughly equivalent to the numbers killed on the road per year. Not really evidence of a big risk.

That doesn't mean that you should go to work if you are 65 and in poor health of course, but overall there is both a low risk AND a trivial number of deaths.

Note that far more taxi drivers (in numbers) have died than nurses, which to me makes the whole 'clap for the NHS' thing a bit of a joke, considering that there are more nurses than taxi drivers in the UK.

So on average around 1 in 10,000

Our chance of getting cancer is apparently close to 1 in 2

Seems pretty good odds to me

Reassured by the numbers for manufacturing as well

Thank you for posting, this has helped get things in perspective

I too am baffled by some of the job titles!

The ONS have a coding scheme for each occupation to account for workers who have different job titles but who essentially do the same thing. Then occupations are coded into similar types. That is why your occupation will have its own 4 digit code, Peggysgettingcrazy, but in this graph it will then have been subsumed into a similar group.

Retired people are not included in this graph because it is about people under the state retirement age. They show men and women separately because men and women have different death rates. I should try and look at the source to see if there is one for woman.

I think this is really important because, as other posters point out, an IT professional may even have started working from home before lockdown but eg a bouncer in a busy inner city pub (elementary security operative) who worked right up until midnight on the day pubs were closed could have been exposed to a lot of people with coronavirus.

Death rates always vary by occupation - construction sites run by dodgy companies are always unsafe places. Similarly, bus drivers always have higher death rates. Of course this graph might change as time goes on but this pandemic has certainly highlighted what an unequal society we live in.

Beware limited statistics!

There seem to be several issues with this graph. It's per 100,000 of working population, so not judging the risk of one occupation against another in the way it immediately suggests. The numbers used are very small to extrapolate this information. And it doesn't control for income. Outcomes aren't all about income, but it's very well documented that on average, lower incomes equal poorer health outcomes.

Payroll, tax returns, etc aren't coded by job title nor occupation so ONS can't possibly know the numbers of people working in each occupation with any degree of certainty at all. It's all guesswork based on a few samples.

Just realised what I said about income wasn't really what I meant. We shouldn't control for income as in wipe out the difference. But that should be part of the discussion - e.g. the vast differences in Health Professionals vs Caring Personal Services - is that exposure, lack of PPE, chronic under payment of carers, etc?

My hope is that the Covid statistics are examined in a way that general statistics rarely are, and the existing inequalities in this country are exposed and addressed.

Even with no vaccine we are much better off than then because we are testing 100k per day rather than 3k

No, we're not. The 100k target

a) has not been reached on a regular basis since the first target day

b) counts tests sent out rather than tests actually performed, let alone processed

c) includes tests performed by non-professionals which may well contain a high number of false negatives because ordinary people are sometimes squeamish about shoving things to the back of their throats fighting the gag reflex

d) there is now evidence that not all the information from tests provided by the private testing company have been reported to government

There seem to be several issues with this graph. They aren't issues with the graph itself though. They are issues with how it is being presented, out of context, with little understanding of how it fits with other information, also available, in the same place!

My hope is that the Covid statistics are examined in a way that general statistics rarely are, and the existing inequalities in this country are exposed and addressed That is what the ONS does, all day every day, from the Central Statistics Office in the 60s up to 2000s when it became non ministerial! Lots of details, analysis on socio-economic issues/inequalities.

I know the wiki thing is not the best source but its explanation of the ONS is good

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_for_National_Statistics_(United_Kingdom)

@corythatwas nonetheless there is a lot more testing than previously, it is still improving and is available to more people in more places. It sometimes helps to take a step back and see the good that is happening rather than dwell on the shit storm!

Apologies that sounds incredibly patronising when I read it back, but I can't think of another way to phrase it ithat isn't just as bad. I hope you get what I meant!

"Whats an elementary security operation?"

Sounds like a basic job in security, makes me think of a security guard anyway.

" It sometimes helps to take a step back and see the good that is happening rather than dwell on the shit storm!"

Sometimes, but this is not one of those times. We're near the top of shit countries in the world dealing with this. We need to be realistic about the problems.

So are we saying that health professionals have a really small risk of infection and should all open non essential services immediately, whereas security guards will need to work in hazmat suits for the foreseeable future? There is a lot wrong with using this chart to argue about the relative safety of different jobs.

I think this is much more sensible - lists dental nurses at the top for chance of exposure which is common sense to me - data also from ons.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52637008

OP - I nearly started a thread on this but chickened out.

I could have wept when Inread that by occupation doctors and nurses were no more likely than the general public to coronavirus but that those in public transport, construction, retail, care workers and chefs (!) were at greater risk.

And of course the statistic that 26% of deaths in care homes statistics.

(Oh yes, I forgot security guards )