Amazon on Thursday said that 19,816 front-line employees in the US have tested positive or been presumed positive for the disease since the start of March.
Earlier, Amazon tried to play down the importance of sharing data on how COVID-19 affected the workers. However, on Thursday, the e-commerce giant said that it had done a thorough analysis of data on all 1.37 million Amazon and Whole Foods Market front-line employees across the US employed at any time from March 1 to September 19.
In a blog post, Amazon said, "We compared COVID-19 case rates to the general population, as reported by Johns Hopkins University for the same period, accounting for geography and the age composition of our employees to make the data as accurate as possible.”
It added, "Based on this analysis if the rate among Amazon and Whole Foods Market employees were the same as it is for the general population rate, we estimate that we would have seen 33,952 cases among our workforce."
