Nearly 20,000 Amazon workers infected with COVID-19. ‘Lower than the expected number’
Nearly 20,000 Amazon employees have been infected with COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, the company says.
Amazon announced Thursday that 19,816 workers tested positive or have been presumed positive. The company says the cases are fewer than expected when compared to the infection rate in the general U.S. population.
Amazon says it is testing thousands of employees a day and plans on reaching 50,000 tests per day by November.
“When it became clear in March that testing Amazon employees for COVID-19 was going to be of critical importance, we assembled a team with a variety of skills — from research scientists and program managers to procurement specialists and software engineers — and moved them from their day jobs to focus on this initiative,” Amazon said in a blog post.
The company says its analysis of nearly 1.4 million Amazon and Whole Foods frontline workers employed between March 1 and Sept. 19 shows a lower case rate than the U.S. when adjusting for age and location.
“Based on this analysis, if the rate among Amazon and Whole Foods Market employees were the same as it is for the general population rate, we estimate that we would have seen 33,952 cases among our workforce,” the company says. “In reality, 19,816 employees have tested positive or been presumed positive for COVID-19 — 42% lower than the expected number.”
Amazon provided a chart of case rates state by state.
According to Amazon, the analysis is “conservative” because it includes positive and presumptive cases, and “actual COVID-19 rates in the general population are greater than the official counts because not everyone in the general public gets screened for symptoms or tested.”
“By contrast, Amazon employees are regularly screened for symptoms and are increasingly being tested at work, regardless of whether they are showing symptoms, in order to identify asymptomatic cases,” the blog post said.
Amazon said the information would be “more powerful” if other major employers released data. It wants other companies to release information.
“We all have a vested interest in returning to some version of normal and safely helping our communities and the economy,” Amazon said. “We hope sharing this data and our learnings will encourage others to follow, and will prove useful as states make decisions about reopening public facilities and employers consider whether and how to bring people back to work.”