Linking Employment and Death: Measuring the Structural Disparity in COVID-19 Deaths for Non-telework Essential Workers

Abstract

The intensity of the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic were a surprise to many people and functioned as an unexpected disturbance where individuals and businesses were slow to adapt their behavior. This event allows us to explore pre-pandemic structural differences in employment and estimate the public health impacts of these first few months of the pandemic. Novel datasets provided by the Connecticut Department of Health and the Massachusetts Department of Health enable us to link deaths to industry and occupation directly at the individual level. A significant number of working-aged people died from COVID-19, with black and Hispanic populations dying at much higher rates. Linking individual deaths with employment, we find that nearly half of these deaths come from people working non-telework essential jobs. Black and Hispanic non-telework essential workers died at a rate 14-percentage points higher than white individuals employed in these same occupations.