Amazon said that almost 20,000 U.S. employees have been tested positive for Covid-19 during a time period of six months, and this disclosure follows criticism from some lawmakers and employees that the world’s largest online retailer was too secretive about outbreaks within its ranks.
The retailer said that 19,816 workers tested positive for the respiratory disease, or were presumed positive, out of 1,372,000 U.S. front-line employees who worked for the company from March 1 to Sept. 19, an infection rate of 1.44%. The company said that if its employees contracted the virus at a rate equal to that of the general population, Amazon would have seen 33,952 cases.
Amazon has dealt with outbreaks of Covid-19 at facilities in Europe and the U.S. Company data published alongside the blog post show that Amazon’s case rate was lower than the overall rate in most U.S. states where the company operates. In the first months of the pandemic, Amazon scrambled to adjust its operations and accommodate social distancing at its hundreds of warehouses, which kept operating through state-mandated closures in March and April. At the same time, the company repeatedly declined to detail the scope of the sicknesses within its ranks, with a top logistics executive calling the figure “not a particularly useful number.”
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