Amazon Says Nearly 20,000 Its Workers Got Covid-19

Amazon on Thursday said that slightly more than 19,800 of its employees have tested positive for Covid-19 since the start of March.

Data on the e-commerce giant's 1.37 million frontline workers, including those at its Whole Foods Market grocery stores in the United States, showed a lower infection rate than expected, Amazon said.

The release of the figure comes as some workers in logistics centers have criticised the company's safeguards to protect them from the pandemic as well as its reluctance to share information about colleagues who get infected.

has ramped up testing to 50,000 a day across 650 sites, according to the Seattle-based company.

"Since the beginning of this crisis, we've worked hard to keep our employees informed, notifying them of every new case in their building," Amazon said in a blog post sharing Covid-19 infection rates among its frontline workers.

If the rate of infection among Amazon and Whole Foods workers were the same as the general US population, the number of cases would have topped 33,000, according to the company.

Copyright AFP. All rights reserved.

RECENT NEWS

Europe Paralysed As Middle East War Exposes Strategic Weakness

Europe likes to describe itself as a geopolitical power. The war spreading across the Middle East has revealed something... Read more

Tesla Moves Into Britains Power Market After Ofgem Approval

Tesla has secured approval to supply electricity directly to homes and businesses across Great Britain after the UK ener... Read more

War Risk Returns To Markets As VIX Surges

For most of the past year, global markets behaved as though geopolitical risk had largely disappeared. Inflation was eas... Read more

Gulf Shipping Crisis Raises Risk Of Global Food Price Shock

Tensions in the Middle East are beginning to spill into global food markets as disruption to shipping through the Strait... Read more

Markets Prepare For Fallout From US Led Airstrikes

US and Israeli strikes on Iran have jolted global markets back into a world where geopolitical risk is not a tail event ... Read more

WPP Aims To Cut £500 In Costs In AI Race

WPP has unveiled a sweeping restructuring programme aimed at stripping out £500mn of annual costs by 2028, as new chief... Read more