Identifying essential critical infrastructure workers during the COVID-19 pandemic using standardized industry codes

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Epidemiology
• Occupational Health

Background:

• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) defined essential critical infrastructure workers (ECIW) during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• The CISA advisory list is a common national definition but lacks mapping to U.S. Census industry codes (CICs).
• This gap hinders the identification of ECIW populations in public health data.

Purpose of the Study:

• To map the CISA ECIW advisory list to standardized U.S. industry codes.
• To facilitate the identification and analysis of essential workers in public health datasets.
• To support public health interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic and future crises.

Main Methods:

• Mapped CISA v4.0 advisory list to North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes.
• Cross-walked NAICS codes to U.S. Census industry codes (CICs).
• Grouped CICs as essential, non-essential, or mixed; analyzed industry-occupation pairs and population estimates.

Main Results:

• Created publicly available spreadsheets linking CISA ECIW designations to NAICS and CICs.
• 71.0% of Census industries (80.6% of workers) and 80.7% of NAICS industries (87.1% of workers) were designated essential.
• Provided population estimates for various industry and industry-occupation classifications.

Conclusions:

• Successfully identified essential critical infrastructure workers using standardized industry codes.
• These classifications are valuable for public health interventions and analyses.
• Supports better understanding and response to pandemics and future public health emergencies.