Amazon will mandate face masks indoors for 900,000 warehouse workers regardless of whether they are vaccinated against COVID-19
Amazon will be requiring all of its 900,000 U.S. warehouse workers to wear masks indoors, regardless of their vaccination status, starting Monday.
The move follows steps by a slew of other retailers, including Walmart and Target, to mandate masks for their workers.
Amazon said Friday that its call for a nationwide mask mandate for its warehouse workers was in response to the spread of COVID-19 variants in the U.S., and guidance from public health authorities and its own medical experts.
Amazon has been requiring only warehouse workers not vaccinated against COVID-19 wear masks.
Amazon will require its 900,000 warehouse employees to wear their masks indoors. Picture is an Amazon employee wearing a mask as the pandemic hit New York in March, 2020
Warehouse workers, like those pictured in 2019, in Goodyear, Arizona, will have to wear masks regardless of their vaccinations status
Amazon Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said the company was pushing to get more employees vaccinated amid the rise of the delta variant
Amazon's Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said last week that rising coronavirus infections linked to the delta variant are pushing the company to get more workers vaccinated. It´s also working with local authorities on safety measures.
So far, Seattle-based Amazon has not required its employees to be vaccinated. But Disney and Walmart announced vaccine mandates for white-collar workers, and Microsoft, Google and Facebook said they will require proof of vaccination for employees and visitors to their U.S. offices.
In many of those cases the mandates apply to workers in locations of substantial COVID-19 transmission.
Earlier this week, Tyson Foods announced it will require all U.S. employees to get vaccinated by November, becoming one of the first major employers of front-line workers to do so amid surging cases of the virus.
This year, the highly contagious 'Delta' variant is wreaking havoc on the US, which saw more than 250,000 new Covid-19 cases on Friday Thursday, teetering close to the all-time high infection rates not seen since January.
The country hadn't had an average of 100,000 cases per day since mid-February.
The number of total COVID-19 cases in the US has surpassed 35.6 million as of Saturday
The number of deaths from COVID-19 in the US has risen to 616,493 as of Saturday
The total number of Americans who've received the COVID-19 vaccine has risen to 58.4% as of Saturday
There were more than 1,000 COVID-19 related deaths recorded Friday, with a seven-day average of 426 deaths, which is a 58 percent spike over the last three weeks.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has revealed that 93 percent of all cases are linked to the variant, including its subtypes.
More than 60 cases of the new Delta-plus variant have been detected in the San Francisco-Bay area as coronavirus cases continue to rise throughout the country.
The new strain, an off-shoot of the highly-transmissible Delta variant, is thought to be more contagious than its predecessor, but is still not the most common variant in the area - with more than 700 cases of the alpha variant reported.