World largest e-commerce company Amazon Inc. (AMZN) has revealed that 19,000 of its employees in the United States contracted coronavirus at some point this year. This number translates to 1.44% of the company’s total labor force.
A number of labor advocates have been constantly criticizing how the company has been responding to the pandemic in terms of safety of its employees. Some Amazon employees and legislators have been claiming the company is exposing its employees to the virus by keeping its warehouses open during the pandemic.
In response the company said infection rate among its employees is 42% lower than expected in regard to spread of the virus across the general population.
In a blog post by the company, Amazon said it will increase its testing of the virus to 50,000 U.S. employees per day through internal mechanisms. Additionally, the company urged other business entities to report comparable figures.
“This information would be more powerful if there were similar data from other major employers to compare it to,” said Amazon.
The tests were done between March 1 and September 19 and the numbers include those of employees who contracted the virus outside work.
