Occupational Risk in Relation to Coronavirus COVID-19
/I written a fair bit (and analysed a whole lot more) of the COVID19 situation and data but not published here because, frankly, the minute it’s published it’s out of date. Moreover, even using official data sources such as John Hopkins University, there’s a kind of “data entropy” at work, where data volume increases over time, but quality reduces. I could do a whole post on that topic alone, but that’s for another day.
Meanwhile, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published an intriguing data set that quantified the nearly 400 occupations in the UK and, amongst other things, classified the type of contact with other people that workers had:
proximity (ranging from touching to close distance to no close contact with people at all),
and exposure ranging from many times a day to weekly/monthly/yearly to never.
This data can be explored interactively on the ONS website but I’ve also tried to produce some static readouts here, although it’s quite a challenge to compress this amount of data into a one-page visualisation! So, you will see a number of variations.
As the debate intensifies over whether to start schools up or not, it’s interesting to note that teachers and classroom assistants are basically in the next tranche of most-at-risk workers, behind the healthcare, police, cleaning and delivery key-workers that have kept critical services running. Many questions still remain (at the time of writing) as to the level of risk posed by the children they will mix with. Children, although seen to be less susceptible themselves to the disease, are certainly not immune.
HOw does pay compare for those potentially most-exposed. Redder, larger, more-to-right = more at risk. Lower down = lower pay.
Coloured by risk and size by percentile (% figure means x% of workers have this risk or higher)
coloured and ordered by risk, Sized by number of workers in sector.
OccuPations sized, sorted and coloured by risk
Occupations sized and sorted by sector size, coloured by risk
Some cautionary notes come with this data:
Risk profiles were actually collated from American workers, so difference in process and work-style could mean UK workers have a different profile.
The risk profile was devised prior to COVID19 and doesn’t take account of any potential social distances or other safety approaches (e.g PPE) that may be applied to a given occupation. So, in some sense, the risk score indicates what degree of protection could be needed.
