The Amazon warehouse worker in Indianapolis , Indiana, died of COVID-19, the company reported.

 

Death takes the confirmed estimate of COVID-19 deaths in Amazon warehouses to seven, but the Amazon reporting process makes it impossible to ascertain the actual number of deaths. Many staff at IND8 first heard of death by rumours and claim that management started to warn employees more generally only after they had been questioned.

 

"They weren't going to say anything if it wasn't for people asking questions," says the IND8 staff, who asked to stay anonymous out of fear of retaliation.

 

Amazon has consistently refused to reveal how many factory workers have been infected with or died with the infection. In an interview on "60 Minutes" broadcast Sunday, Amazon's senior vice president of global operations Dave Clark called infection numbers "not a especially helpful figure." On Tuesday, 13 state attorneys general wrote to Amazon calling for clarification about the number of employees who had contracted or died of COVID-19.

 

The Amazon spokesperson said the organization had been aware of the death of the Indiana employee on 30 April and had promptly alerted all workers inside the factory. "We are devastated by the loss of an employee at our Indianapolis, IN town," the organization said in a tweet. "His families and loved ones are on our hearts, and in the days ahead we are helping his colleagues."

 

Throughout March, Amazon staff blamed the organization for refusing to alert customers that their coworkers had been infected with the infection. The organization is now issuing text warnings or automatic calls anytime a worker is infected, but the notifications still apply only to "few new incidents," meaning that employees have been left to monitor themselves to assess the occurrence of coronavirus in their workplaces. At IND8, staff assume that the number is about a million. Jana Jumpp, an Amazon warehouse worker in Indiana, has been gathering warnings sent to staff around the country and reports that at least 800 Amazon warehouse employees have been infected with the infection.

 

The case of Indianapolis is the second reported death of an Amazon warehouse worker in the us, after a worker has been confirmed to have died in Jeffersonville, and the seventh in the Country. Staff have died in Staten Island , New York; Bethpage, New York; Waukegan, Illinois; Hawthorne, California; and Tracy, California. This is not certain how the worker caught the infection, and the employee's identity has not been released. Amazon claims it was the only one in the building on April 19th.

 

Amazon has been able to retain something close to regular activities during the pandemic. Met with a increase in demand, 175,000 new employees were employed and declined to close Out factories where employees tested positive. (To date, only one return-processing plant in the United States has been closed in Kentucky since the governor ordered it to be shut down.) Since briefly halting deliveries of non-essential products to its warehouses, the constraints have now been relaxed and the shipping times have started to collapse to their pre-pandemic levels.

 

Nevertheless, staff, critics and politicians have raised questions about the health of the company's warehouses. Beginning at the end of March, factory workers staged walkouts, asking for warehouses to be locked and cleaned after staff tested positive for the virus. Amazon terminated a number of employees who posed health issues, and last friday, lawmakers wrote a letter requesting reports on terminations. Earlier this month, a senior engineer and vice president quit due to the dismissal of employees who asked for better warehouse conditions.

 

Amazon also implemented new safety steps, including temperature sensors, facial masks and improved washing. "Our key priority is to ensure the health and welfare of our workers, and from April to June we plan to spend approximately $ 4 billion in COVID-related programs to deliver goods to consumers and keep employees safe," the company said in a statement. The organization also reports that the level of contamination at its factories are at or below the levels in the areas where they are situated.

 

Yet staff at IND8 and elsewhere complain that sanitation has been sloppy and conditions are frequently too busy to allow for sufficient social distances. Many are worried that recent government reforms have put them at greater risk. This month, Amazon changed its policy at the start of the pandemic that allowed employees to take unrestricted days off without compensation. (Amazon is expected to end another coronavirus program, an extra $2 an hour of risk compensation, on June 1st.) The leave scheme allowed employees who feared for their safety — and could afford to go without a paycheck — to stay home without being fired for overdrawing their quarterly quota of 20 hours of unpaid time off.When the policy ended on May 1st, staff claim that their workplaces were even more crowded.