Press Statement

Preasráiteas

01 October 2021

Go to release: A Profile of COVID-19 in Ireland - Using Census 2016 Household Data to Analyse COVID-19 Waves, March 2020 - May 2021

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has today (01 October 2021) published A Profile of COVID-19 in Ireland - Using Census 2016 Household Data to Analyse COVID-19 Waves, March 2020 - May 2021. 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 2020 and May 2021 looking at the three waves of the pandemic experienced over this period.

Commenting on the report, Steven Conroy, Statistician, said: “Analysing the cases over the first three waves of the pandemic, we can see that the profile of cases changed from the first wave, where cases were concentrated more in older age groups and in Dublin, to the second and third waves, where younger age groups were more likely to be infected and the cases were spread around the rest of the country.

White Irish accounted for more than 80% of confirmed COVID-19 cases across the three waves from March 2020 to May 2021, but the percentage of Asian or Asian Irish fell in the second and third waves from 5% of cases to 2%.

In households with a confirmed COVID-19 case, 8% were in overcrowded homes in wave three, down from 19% of cases in wave one. When using the term overcrowded, we mean when there is more than one person per room.

On Census night 2016, 91% of confirmed cases in the third wave stated they were in very good or good health while patterns of highest level of education were consistent across the waves and were similar to the results in the 2016 Census.

More than half (56%) of confirmed cases were those working for payment or profit, and Nurses and Midwives was the most common occupation of COVID-19 cases in wave one. However, the most common occupation to contract COVID-19 in waves two and three were Sales and Retail Assistants, Cashiers and Checkout Operators.

Employees in the Health and Social Work sector were hardest hit in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, making up 60% of cases amongst those employed in April 2020. However, as society reopened after the first lockdown in summer 2020, cases amongst those employed in the Wholesale & Retail Trade sector increased from 5% of cases in July 2020 to 17% in August 2020 and have remained consistently at this level since.

Looking at Standardised Confirmed Incidence Rates we see that rates were higher in the most affluent areas in wave one, with a rate of 655 per 100,000 population in the most affluent quintile compared with 499 in the most deprived. This pattern reversed in wave two, with a rate of 781 in the most affluent quintile compared with 1,055 in the most deprived. By wave three, the rates were similar in the most affluent quintile (3,907) and the most deprived (3,874).”

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 254,013 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the CIDR dataset up to and including 12 May 2021, 70% (178,620 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 178,620 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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