Coronavirus: Amazon Doing Temperature Checks On Thousands Of Workers
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) – Amazon announced Thursday it has begun checking the temperatures of thousands of its employees as they arrive to work every day amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The e-commerce giant said that it began doing temperature checks on March 29. About 100,000 employees at specific sites and Whole Food Market stores are undergoing the daily temperature checks. The company expects to roll it out everywhere in the U.S. and Europe by early next week.
Employees who register a temperature higher than 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit are asked to go home. They can only return to work after being fever-free for three consecutive days. Retailer Walmart announced similar measures earlier this week.
Amazon also disclosed that it is working to get masks available to all its employees.
"The millions of masks we ordered weeks ago are now arriving, and we're distributing them to our teams as quickly as possible," Amazon said in a blog post.
At least two Amazon workers in the Inland Empire have contracted coronavirus. On Sunday, Amazon confirmed that a worker at a fulfillment center in the Riverside County city of Eastvale had tested positive for coronavirus. Last week an employee at an Amazon fulfillment center in Moreno Valley also tested positive.
Amazon also reported Wednesday that it has hired 80,000 of the 100,000 new employees it announced it was planning to hire in mid-March to deal with the spike in demand for its delivery services with tens of millions of Americans under stay-at-home orders.
Amazon last month informed third-party sellers that its fulfillment centers will only accept shipments of medical supplies and household staples because of the extremely high-demand for those items.
