Amazon says over 19,000 workers test positive
Company says the number of positive cases is below what it expected
Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday said more than 19,000 of its workers have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, the first time major a U.S. employer has disclosed such data.
The company said the number of positive cases is below what it expected. Amazon, which months ago began to build its own labs for testing, has tested thousands of employees since March and said it would be conducting 50,000 tests a day by November.
Based on the infection rate of the general population, Amazon said it would have expected 33,952 positive cases among a workforce of more than 1.3 million in the U.S. Instead, it said 19,816 employees have tested positive or been presumed positive. The number includes employees at Whole Foods Market, which Amazon owns.
The U.S. has had about 2,180 cases of Covid-19 per 100,000 people, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Amazon’s infection rate would be about 1,442 per 100,000 workers, according to Wall Street Journal calculations.
Early in the pandemic, Amazon faced criticism from employees about its response to the virus. Employees at several facilities staged walkouts in the spring demanding that Amazon shut down facilities with positive cases. Workers said Amazon was slow to communicate positive cases among its employees.
The company until now hadn’t disclosed the rate at which employees were testing positive.
Amazon called on other corporations to release such data, a step very few companies have taken, even as some ramped up hiring to meet a surge in demand at the onset of the pandemic.
“This information would be more powerful if there were similar data from other major employers to compare it to,” Amazon said in a blog post. “Wide availability of data would allow us to benchmark our progress and share best practices across businesses and industries.”
Amazon noted that there are no standards for reporting or sharing data or even seeking comparable information from other major employers either about infections or quarantine practices.
The tech giant said it has hired dozens of lab technicians and assembled a team of research scientists, software engineers and other specialists to focus on its testing initiative. In addition to the testing, Amazon said it has implemented more than 150 procedural changes at its warehouses, including temperature checks and barriers, and distributed more than 100 million face masks. It said social distancing at its warehouses had led to lower transmission rates.
While Amazon has touted its safety protocols, the company’s rhetoric has often been at odds with the complaints of some employees, who have continued to say Amazon isn’t providing enough protection and hasn’t been transparent enough.
Workers interviewed by The Wall Street Journal have said it remains difficult to maintain social distance at facilities because some tasks require them to be close to other employees. Amazon, which initially provided extra pay to employees during the onset of the pandemic, has rolled back such benefits.
“Amazon’s confession that nearly 20,000 of its workers have been infected by Covid-19 is the most damning evidence we have seen that corporate America has completely failed to protect our country’s frontline workers in this pandemic,” said Marc Perrone, the president of labor group United Food and Commercial Workers International, in a statement Thursday.
Employees at multiple Amazon warehouses walked out in the spring in cities such as New York and Chicago. Amazon fired at least three workers who had spoken out about working conditions during the pandem
ic. The company said it had taken action after employees had violated workplace protocols, but employees have said the company has tried to drown out criticism.
Activists have continued to try to get Amazon’s attention, including protesting at the Washington, D.C., home of Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos in August.
The company has been hiring at a rapid pace this year to meet an uptick in demand as more people shop online due to the pandemic. It is on pace to hire more than 200,000 workers this year, with its total, nontemporary workforce expected to exceed one million people in the next several months. That figure doesn’t include Whole Foods workers.
Amazon said it has worked to keep its employees informed and is screening them regularly whether or not they show symptoms. Workers typically have been notified of positive
cases at their facilities through calls and text messages the company sends out.
Beyond testing, Amazon said it is also measuring the rate at which employees are placed into quarantine after potentially having come into contact with someone who tested positive. The quarantine rate is “an important concept in epidemiology because it tracks the rate of transmission,” Amazon said.
In March, Amazon was placing three or four employees in quarantine for each confirmed case, but after implementing a number of changes to ensure social distancing and using “video-based contact tracing,” far fewer workers have had to be placed in quarantine. The number is now down to only a fraction of a person needing to quarantine after a confirmed case, according to the company.
“This means that our employees are at a very low risk of transmission in the workplace,” Amazon said.