Guards and drivers more at risk than nurses
Figures show low-paid jobs have highest mortality rates, while PPE seems to be protecting NHS staff
SECURITY GUARDS, taxi drivers and chefs are the workers most likely to die from coronavirus, facing a higher risk than even care home or NHS staff.
The risk levels are revealed in data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) published the morning after Boris Johnson encouraged the nation to get back to work. Bus and coach drivers also face a particularly high risk.
Experts have said the figures have “huge implications” for the route out of lockdown. Male security guards, such as those in supermarkets, were found to have a mortality rate of 45.7 deaths per 100,000, while taxi drivers and chauffeurs had a rate of 36.4.
Male bus and coach drivers were found to have a rate of 26.4 deaths per 100,000, chefs a rate of 35.9, and sales and retail assistants a rate of 19.8.
For male care workers and home carers in England and Wales, the mortality rate involving Covid-19 is estimated to be 32 deaths per 100,000.
People from BAME backgrounds face a disproportionately high risk of death from Covid-19, although there is no consensus on why that is. It is thought that 38 per cent of England’s taxi drivers are from an Asian community.
A quarter of Transport for London staff are BAME, as are more than one in three chefs. The figures – the first of their kind during the crisis – are based on analysis of the 2,494 registered deaths involving coronavirus among workers aged 20 to 64 in England and Wales up to April 20. Nearly two thirds of deaths among workers were men.
The data showed that those working in the lowest skilled occupations had the highest rate of death.
On Sunday, the Prime Minister encouraged those who could not work from home to return to their place of work, particularly affecting those in manufacturing and construction.
Keith Neal, emeritus professor in the epidemiology of infectious diseases at the University of Nottingham, said: “Higher mortality in chefs and other occupations will reflect significantly higher transmission risks prior to lockdown restrictions which has important policy implications for restarting work.”
The figures also show that doctors and nurses did not have higher rates of death involving Covid-19 compared with the wider population of the same age and sex. Prof Neal said: “This suggests that PPE (personal protective equipment) is working, or that by the time patients are ill enough to be admitted to hospital, often after over a week, they may be less infectious, or a combination of both factors.”
The higher rate of death among care workers suggested they had poorer access to PPE or dealt with people at an earlier stage of infection, he added.
For female workers, the ONS highlighted only one broad group where the mortality rate was significantly higher: caring, leisure and other service jobs.
John Phillips, acting GMB general secretary, said: “If you are low paid and working through the Covid-19 crisis, you are more likely to die – that’s how stark these figures are.”