Hands on
The most dangerous jobs during the pandemic:
A new study from the University of California, San Francisco suggests that line cooks have the highest risk of mortality during the Covid pandemic — even more than healthcare workers.
For the study, which hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet, researchers analyzed California death certificates for working-age people 18 to 65, during the first seven months of the pandemic. Then they looked at how the number of deaths increased in that time frame compared to pre-pandemic times.
…
Line cooks had a 60% increase in mortality associated with the pandemic.
The top five occupations that had higher than a 50% mortality rate increase during the pandemic include cooks, line workers in warehouses, agricultural workers, bakers and construction laborers.
You’ll notice these are all grunt jobs, labor jobs, mostly badly paid jobs (I think construction pays better than the others). They aren’t jobs you can do on your laptop at home.
The risk also varied by race and ethnicity. The study found that “excess mortality,” which is the gap between the expected number of deaths in past years and 2020, increased 36% for Latino Californians, 28% for Black Californians and 18% for Asian Californians. Among White working-age Californians, the mortality rate increased by 6% during the pandemic.
Privilege of the most literal kind.
They are also jobs that involve sweating. I wonder if that’s part of the factor, as well.
Huh, that’s interesting, hadn’t thought of it. I don’t think I’ve seen anything about sweat itself spreading the virus, but sweating also implies heavy breathing, so yes, it would make sense that work where you get heated spreads the virus.
They’re also jobs that can require close quarters with others. Commercial kitchens especially, plus the heat and steam, which might encourage you to remove your mask, and the steam might help the virus stay airborne for longer. Recent infections in Victoria, Australia are thought to be linked to use of a nebuliser, a device for asthmatics that conveys medicine into the lungs on moist air.
The excess mortality figures could be misleading out of context. Taken with the rest of the report it shows in part that white Californians are less likely to hold the riskiest jobs, but in isolation could be read as white Californians being less susceptible to the virus in general.
Regarding working in kitchens, as others have suggested hot, moist air will trap the virus more effectively and is slower to disperse than cool, dry air. Efficient extractor fans will reduce the risk but anybody who has worked in a commercial kitchen will tell you that even with extractors running they remain excessively hot, humid environments.
Second that, AoS. Worked my way through college in a commercial kitchen…no pandemics then, so I didn’t have to worry about additional risk beyond the ordinary.