
A Worker in Amazon's New York Warehouse Has Died of the Coronavirus - Foe
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/y3zmp7/a-worker-in-amazons-new-york-warehouse-has-died-of-the-coronavirus
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throwaway9bil
Disclosure: Amazon employee posting from a throwaway account.

First off, it is extremely sad that a coworker died. Obviously every death is
a tragedy and I would not want to diminish that at all.

With that said, I have been reading the same news stories you have and was
curious to know how well Amazon is doing at keeping my coworkers in essential
roles safe.

This article, and others I've read, cite 2 fatal Covid Cases. I believe the
most recent estimates for Amazon's employee count put it at around 1,000,000
employees. To be conservative I'll say 950,000. 2/950000 = 0.0000021053, so
__0.0002% __of Amazon employees have died that we know of.

70,000 people in the USA have died of Covid from the numbers I see today.
Assuming a US population of 330,000,000 we do the math (70000/330000000) and
get 0.000212121 or __0.02% __of US residents have died of Covid.

This obviously does not weigh things like age range, etc. but I seeing that my
fellow employees are 1/100 as likely to have died of Covid as the average US
resident makes me feel good about how effective the protective measures are.

~~~
Vastov
Does your 1 million employee number include those in roles that have the
ability to work from home or otherwise in an environment outside of the
delivery/warehouse sphere?

Additionally, it is likely better to look at rates of infection or number of
cases among Amazon warehouse employees. The “protective measures” implemented
by Amazon are intended to prevent the spread and contraction of COVID. We can
sidestep the difficulties of controlling for age and other factors with
respect to mortality as you mentioned and instead evaluate the efficacy of
Amazon’s protective measures by examining infection rates.

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WaitWaitWha
From the title, it reads like the warehouse worker died at the warehouse.
According to the article "company said that the employee who died hadn’t been
at the warehouse since April 11". 'providing “inadequate” protections to its
workers under state law'...

What is "adequate"? What would be adequate from any company? We are quick to
say inadequate, but at what level would we say "sure XYZ company did adequate
job at protecting employees"? The answer is never. The only "permitted
solution" is complete company shutdown. But, would we stand for that? Would we
tolerate Amazon shuttering her doors until this is over? I highly doubt it.

This bothers me not only for Amazon for pretty much any politician's
perspective. What is "adequate"?

