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

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.