One day after a report by NBC News dug into Amazon’s lack of transparency around COVID-19 outbreaks in its facilities, the company has released data on how many employees tested or were presumed positive. This kind of information has largely not been released by other major companies in the US, and while it’s difficult to exactly gauge how Amazon’s handled the pandemic compare to others, at least we have some idea of where to start. Amazon said it’s conducting thousands of tests per day, and plans to reach 50,000 tests per day across 650 sites by November.
Amazon said that of 1,372,000 employees who worked there or for Whole Foods between March 1st and September 19th, some 19,816 either tested positive or were presumed positive for COVID-19. It also went further, with a state by state breakdown (PDF) that showed case percentages among employees tracked lower than the general population in most cases.