Occupational risk of COVID-19 by country of birth. A register-based study

  1. Marte Kjøllesdal
  2. Karin Magnusson

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Abstract

Background

Occupational exposure has been suggested to contribute to a disproportionate burden of COVID-19 among immigrants. We aim to assess this hypothesis in Norway.

Methods

In 2729 627 adults born in Norway, Somalia, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Turkey, we examined whether persons employed as taxi drivers, bus and tram drivers, child care workers, nurses, personal care workers in health, food service counter attendants, waiters/bartenders, cleaners and shop sale persons had a higher risk of COVID-19, from 1 April 2020 to 2 December 2020, compared with (i) Norwegian-born in the same occupational group and (ii) all others with the same birth country and aged 20–70 years, using logistic regressions.

Results

Within each occupational group, immigrants had a greatly increased odds of COVID-19 when compared with Norwegian-born (odds ratio [OR] ~ 1.66–12.72). However, immigrants working in the selected occupations had the same odds of COVID-19 as person with same birth country not having the same occupation (OR ~ 1). Exceptions were Somalian, Afghani and Iraqi personal care workers in health services who had an increased odds of COVID-19 compared with others from the same country.

Conclusion

Occupation is not an important driver of the high rates of COVID-19 among immigrants from Somalia, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Turkey.

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  1. Version published to 10.1093/pubmed/fdab362
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.03.17.21253349: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementIRB: Ethics: The study was approved by the Regional Ethics Committee South-East (REK 19864)
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Strengths and limitations: We use nation-wide register-based data on both notified COVID-19 and occupation. Because we include all residents of Norway aged 20 to 70 years and utilize routinely registered data, important strengths of our study are limited bias due to selection and misclassification. Important limitations are, first, we were not able to adjust for socioeconomic factors such as income or education, living conditions, urban living, health literacy or risky behavior. We acknowledge that all these factors are relevant for risk of infection and may be associated with persons’ occupation. Second, there may be differences within occupational groups in working contracts, working conditions and tasks. We hypothesize that workers on temporary contracts work more disadvantaged hours and perform tasks with higher risk of infection than others, as well as experience a stronger pressure to come to work even with symptoms of infection. Our data did not include information on whether participants had temporary or permanent position, but we suspect that immigrants more often than others work on temporary contracts. Third, other characteristics of occupations, such as distance to other people and possibility to work from home may (10) be just as relevant as occupations per se. A relatively large proportion of the population, about one in four, was not registered with any work, and excluding these from the reference group did not lead to substantial changes in results. A fourth l...

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  3. Version published to 10.1101/2021.03.17.21253349 on medRxiv