Press Statement

Preasráiteas

02 December 2020

Go to release: A Profile of COVID-19 in Ireland - Using Census 2016 Household Data to Analyse COVID-19 Cases from March to November 2020

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has today (02 December 2020) published A Profile of COVID-19 in Ireland March to November 2020. This publication explores the housing, employment, education and health circumstances on Census night 2016 of persons and households confirmed as positive COVID-19 cases between March and November 2020.

Commenting on the report, Steven Conroy, Statistician, said: ‘Our analysis shows that although COVID-19 has taken a different path through society over the period March to November 2020 it has impacted all facets of society in similar proportions, from housing and households to health and education. It affected all types of industries and occupations with health care workers more adversely affected.

Irish Nationals accounted for 88% of confirmed COVID-19 cases between March and November 2020 and more than two-thirds of cases were living in Family Units with children in April 2016.

In terms of household composition, 54% of households were in a married or cohabiting couple with children family unit while 67% of households were in family units with one or more children, compared with 64% of the general population on Census night 2016.

When looking at cases and housing, 49% of households owned their house with mortgage or loan, 32% of households were owner occupied without loan / mortgage and 26% of cases were renting in April 2016. Some 19% of households with a COVID-19 confirmed case were in overcrowded homes defined as more than one person per room compared to the general population where 1 in 10 people live in overcrowded houses.

On Census night 2016, 86% of confirmed cases stated they were in very good or good health while 16% of cases stated they had a disability. The most commonly taken fields of study by those affected by COVID-19 were nursing and caring (6%), business and administration (2%), accounting and taxation (2%).

More than half (52%) of confirmed cases were those working for payment or profit, 17% were students or pupils and 14% stated they were retired from employment on Census night 2016. The industries that were most affected by COVID-19 were Health & Social Work (22%), Public Administration & Defence (14%) and Wholesale & Retail Trade (11%) and 6% of all cases were among Nurses and Midwifes despite only making up 2% of all employees in April 2016.’

Commenting further on the report, Kieran Culhane, Senior Statistician, said: ‘This publication is categorised as a CSO Frontier Series Publication. Particular care must be taken when interpreting the statistics in this release. CSO Frontier Series may use new methods which are under development and / or data sources which may be incomplete, for example new administrative data sources. Publishing outputs under the Frontier series allows the CSO to provide useful new information to users and get informed feedback on these new methods and outputs whilst at the same time make sure that the limitations are well explained and understood.

In using the increasingly varied sources of data available, the CSO must ensure that we continue to protect and secure data. Our aim is to ensure that citizens can live in an informed society while at the same time ensuring adherence to all relevant data protection legislation.

In this report, of the 71,187 cases of confirmed COVID-19 in the CIDR dataset up to and including 25 November, 69% (49,169 cases) were successfully linked to the CSO’s pseudonymised Census of Population Analysis (COPA) 2016 data set. This report presents a statistical overview of the economic and social statistics of the linked 49,169 individuals only.

As well as the strict legal protections set out in the Statistics Act, 1993, and other existing regulations, we are committed to protecting individual privacy and all identifiable information from each of the data sources used in our analysis, such as name, date of birth and addresses, are removed before use and only anonymised statistical aggregates are produced.’

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