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Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our President, Donald Trump, and his wife Melania have coronavirus now. Frankly, considering how they have been the poster children for not wearing a mask this year I can’t believe it didn’t happen sooner.
What I am more concerned about when it comes to people getting the coronavirus is how are my free two-day Amazon Prime deliveries going to be affected by Amazon revealing that almost 20,000 of its employees have contracted coronavirus, especially with Prime Day, AKA the world’s biggest garage sale, just around the corner?
In a new report published on Thursday, Amazon revealed that between March 1 and September 19 a total of 19,816 employees tested positive or were presumed positive for COVID-19.
While that number sounds like a lot, and it is, it comes from a grand total of 1.37 million Amazon and Whole Foods Market employees.
According to Amazon, in comparison to the general population, as reported by Johns Hopkins University for the same period, if it weren’t for the comprehensive measures the company instituted the number of infected would have been approximately 42 percent higher, or 33,952 cases.
In addition to continuing research being done by the company’s 5,000 member global safety team, Amazon says expects to be conducting 50,000 coronavirus tests per day across 650 sites by November.
All in, we’ve introduced or changed over 150 processes to ensure the health and safety of our teams, including distributing over 100 million face masks, implementing temperature checks at sites around the world, mandating enhanced cleaning procedures at all of our sites, and introducing extensive social distancing measures to reduce the risk for our employees. We’ve eliminated stand-up meetings during shifts, moved information sharing to bulletin boards, staggered break times, and spread out chairs in breakrooms, among other steps. Cleaning occurs across each site about every 90 minutes to sanitize door handles, stairway handrails, lockers, elevator buttons, and touch screens.
So… I will still be getting my free two-day shipping then? Phew.
This information would be more powerful if there were similar data from other major employers to compare it to. Wide availability of data would allow us to benchmark our progress and share best practices across businesses and industries. Unfortunately, there are no standards for reporting or sharing this data, and there’s very little comparable information about infection rates and quarantine rates available from other companies. We all have a vested interest in returning to some version of normal and safely helping our communities and the economy. 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.
Just make sure all of those Amazon employees stay off commercial flights until we get a better handle on the situation.