In an attempt to make the impact of the Coronavirus on its operations more transparent, Amazon announced on Thursday that around 19,816 of its workers in the U.S. had contracted or were presumed to have contracted the disease. The company stated that most of those that had tested positive were its front-line workers at its core business and its Whole Foods stores.
Prior to the announcement, Amazon had declined to share any comprehensive data to the public on the impact the pandemic has had on its workers. Concerns were raised on why the company kept silent, particularly as its warehouses had become the source of most of the household supplies during the height of the health crisis.
Amazon was previously accused of downplaying the impact of the disease on its operations. Without any clear data for each of its sites, it was difficult to get a clear picture of how the disease had spread throughout its supply chain.
The announcement regarding the number of positive cases in its workforce was outlined by the company in a blog post. Amazon stated that it had conducted a thorough analysis of all its 1,372,000 employees working at Whole Foods and e-commerce business from March 1 up to September 19.
Amazon claimed that the number of positive cases within its ranks was roughly 42 percent lower when compared to the case rates of the general population in the United States during the same period. The company compared its own data with those reported by John Hopkins University.
Back in May, Amazon's senior vice president of global operations, Dave Clark, noted in an interview that publishing data on the total number of positive cases within its workforce wasn't "particularly useful." He explained that the data will be relative to the size of a facility and the overall community infection rate where a site is located.
Health and safety agencies have heavily scrutinized Amazon's response to mitigating the spread of the virus within its workforce. During the height of the pandemic, the company continued to operate non-stop, providing necessary goods to people that were forced to stay at home.
The pandemic greatly increased the company's revenues, raising its founder's net worth by tens of billions in just a span of a few months. Due to the concerns over how it protected its workforce, Amazon had received numerous requests from attorneys general for the company to release a state-by-state breakdown of confirmed cases within its ranks.
