Excess deaths of publicly employed educators in South Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic

Martin Gustafsson (), Tsekere Maponya (), Faith Kumalo and Mfela Mahlangu ()
Additional contact information
Martin Gustafsson: ReSEP, Stellenbosch University, and Department of Basic Education
Tsekere Maponya: Department of Basic Education
Faith Kumalo: Department of Basic Education
Mfela Mahlangu: Department of Basic Education

No 02/2023, Working Papers from Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics

Abstract: An excess deaths method used by South Africa’s national authority for schools to understand mortality among publicly employed educators during the COVID-10 pandemic is explained. While pandemic-related deaths in the population were clearly under-reported in South Africa and elsewhere, an initial bottom-up reporting system for the schooling sector resulted in a slight over-reporting of these deaths, probably because schools did not separate out deaths that were likely to have occurred in the absence of the pandemic. Given the importance of understanding teacher mortality in a context of difficult negotiations around the full or partial closure of schools, a more accurate approach was sought, using payroll data, which include information on when an employee dies. It is concluded that the pandemic resulted in the deaths of around 3,500 educators. It is moreover found that the prioritisation of educators in the national vaccination programme reduced mortality for educators in the third and fourth waves of the pandemic. It is estimated that some 870 additional educator deaths would have occurred if vaccinations for educators had not been brought forward. Educator excess deaths during pandemic were clearly concentrated above age 40. The fact that educators at the secondary-level appear to have experienced similar levels of mortality to primary-level educators, despite epidemiological evidence pointing to learners in secondary schools being more likely to infect others, would be in line with the World Health Organization position that the infection of educators was not primarily by learners. A multivariate model finds that black African and coloured educators, and educators in the two provinces Eastern Cape and Northern Cape, experienced particularly high mortality rates.

Keywords: COVID-19; teachers; excess deaths; South Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 I21 J11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ekon.sun.ac.za/wpapers/2023/wp022023/wp022023.pdf First version, 2023 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sza:wpaper:wpapers378

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Melt van Schoor ().