Important new data from the ONS out today looking at Covid-19 deaths by occupation. Key findings: social care workers seeing significantly raised levels of deaths, and people working in lowest-skilled jobs generally are the most vulnerable.

This seems to have quite a lot to do with exposure: the people in the most affected individual jobs are generally those who have had no choice but to keep working, and keep being exposed to members of the public. (And these "exposed" jobs are not well-paid jobs, by and large.)

Here are the death rates for men. Basically managers and professionals have seen far fewer deaths; there are many factors here, some demographic/health related, but also those people are far more able to do their jobs from home.

(This is something that really annoyed me about that "Brexit voters are ignoring lockdown and still going to the workplace!" narrative from a while ago. Real story is: low-paid, low-skilled workers are the ones still expected to go to work, and they are more likely to die)

As evidence this is about exposure, not just demographics - here are Covid death rates for different types of driver. It's the "exposed" ones - taxi/bus drivers - who are dying. These are key workers. These are people risking their lives.

There were 76 Covid-19 deaths of (male) cab drivers in the dataset. The virus accounted for nearly _half_ of all deaths among working age cab drivers over that time. These are people that have no choice but to work, who others _expect_ to work.