Occupations and their impact on the spreading of COVID-19 in urban communities

Abstract

The current pandemic has disproportionally affected the workforce. To improve our understanding of the role that occupations play in the transmission of COVID-19, we analyse real-world network data that were collected in Bucharest between August 1st and October 31st 2020. The data record sex, age, and occupation of 6895 patients and the 13,272 people they have interacted with, thus providing a social network from an urban setting through which COVID-19 has spread. Quite remarkably, we find that medical occupations have no significant effect on the spread of the virus. Instead, we find common transmission chains to start with infected individuals who hold jobs in the private sector and are connected with non-active alters, such as spouses, siblings, or elderly relatives. We use relational hyperevent models to assess the most likely homophily and network effects in the community transmission. We detect homophily with respect to age and anti-homophily with respect to sex and employability. We note that, although additional data would be welcomed to perform more in-depth network analyses, our findings may help public authorities better target under-performing vaccination campaigns.

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Effectiveness of different vaccine platforms in reducing mortality and length of ICU stay in severe and critical cases of COVID‐19 in the Omicron variant era: A national cohort study in Iran

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“…Although herd immunity can be achieved when adaptive immunity occurs in a high percentage of the population worldwide. To prevent a high number of morbidities, mortalities, and economic crises during the epidemic, a wide proportion of the population should gain immunity via vaccination, 9 as having been proved in many other infections such as influenza and meningitis, in which mass vaccination played an effective role in obtaining the herd immunity 10 …”

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