Health – Frankfurt am Main – Corona risk higher in the food and agricultural sector – Health

Frankfurt / Hamburg (dpa) – Not only older people or people with previous illnesses should be specifically protected against infection with the coronavirus, but also members of certain professional groups. This is the opinion of the Frankfurt virologist Sandra Ciesek on Tuesday in the NDR podcast “The Coronavirus Update”. The director of the Institute for Medical Virology at the University Hospital Frankfurt referred to a preprint study from San Francisco.

Scientists had searched the data of more than 10,000 of Covid-19 deceased from California of working age by profession and ethnicity. Employees in the food industry and agriculture were at the highest risk. This was followed by transportation and logistics, construction and factories. By ethnicity, Latinos were at the highest risk.

In Germany, too, you have seen major outbreaks in such professions, said Ciesek. Often people worked there who came to Germany especially for this work and sometimes lived in group accommodation. “That shows once again how important it is that there are good concepts, including good test strategies, for these professional groups,” said Ciesek. It is also important “that one explains well that the vaccination rate in these professions is not too low in order to be able to contain the infection process efficiently”.

According to the Techniker Krankenkasse (TK), people in nursing professions and educators were most often on sick leave in Germany because of Covid-19. This emerges from the data analyzed in advance for the TK Health Report 2021, which is due to appear in June. No deaths were identified in these data.

© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210309-99-754979 / 2

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