About 1.4% of Amazon Workers Have Caught COVID—Below 2.2% U.S. Infection Rate

Nearly 20,000 Amazon employees have been diagnosed with COVID-19 as of Thursday, but the company says their overall infection rate is far below that suffered by the general U.S. public.

Amazon said that 19,816 employees had contracted the virus when announcing the results of a "thorough analysis of data on all 1,372,000 Amazon and Whole Foods Market front-line employees across the U.S. employed at any time from March 1 to September 19, 2020" in a blog post.

The company's numbers indicate that around 1.44 percent of employees have contracted the virus, while the 7,277,352 cases confirmed in the U.S. by Johns Hopkins University represents about 2.2 percent of the country's overall population.

"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," the company wrote. "In reality, 19,816 employees have tested positive or been presumed positive for COVID-19—42% lower than the expected number."

In a state-by-state breakdown of infection rates supplied by the company, in most cases Amazon employees showed fewer infections than would be expected when compared to Johns Hopkins statistics on infections among the general population.

However, there were some exceptions. Workers in Minnesota and West Virginia were infected at rates greater than what would be expected based on the overall population infection rates. In Kansas, Amazon's infection rate was identical to the state's general population rate.

The company described their analysis as "conservative" because it included both presumed cases and those who definitively tested positive, while noting that employees are tested and regularly screened for symptoms "regardless of whether they are showing symptoms," unlike the general public.

The post also urged other major companies to follow suit and share testing information in order to "benchmark our progress and share best practices across businesses and industries."

"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," the company wrote.

Amazon had previously resisted calls to release information on how many employees contracted the virus. The company says it has taken extensive precautions to limit the spread of COVID-19 among workers, with the relatively low infection rates reported in their own analysis appearing to suggest the measures have been effective.

However, some Amazon employees, particularly those working in warehouses, gave the company less than glowing reviews earlier this year. At least hundreds of warehouse workers have protested the company since March, claiming it has ignored safety guidelines and treated workers poorly as demand, and profits, increased significantly during the pandemic.

Amazon declined Newsweek's request for comment.