Facebook on Wednesday said that a worker in the company’s Seattle offices tested positive for Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, making it the second major tech company in the city to be affected by the outbreak.
The tech industry is vital to the economy of Washington State, where a cluster of infections has taken root and 10 people have died, leading companies there to take extra measures to halt the spread of the virus.
“A contractor based in our Stadium East office has been diagnosed with Covid-19,” said Andy Stone, a company spokesman. “We’ve notified our employees and are following the advice of public health officials to prioritize everyone’s health and safety.”
The Seattle area is Facebook’s largest engineering outpost outside of its Bay Area headquarters. It had 5,000 employees in the region as of last September, when it announced plans to expand even more.
The contractor was last in the office on Friday, Feb. 21, the company said. The Seattle office would be closed for three weeks. As an extra precaution, Facebook asked its Seattle-based employees to work from home until the end of March.
Amazon and Microsoft also told their employees to work from home.
In a message to employees Wednesday night, Amazon said it was recommending that all employees in the Seattle region work from home for the month of March, if their job can be done from home. The message came a day after Amazon told employees that a worker in one of its many office buildings in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood had tested positive for the virus.
“We are supporting the affected employee, who remains in quarantine,” said Drew Herdener, an Amazon spokesman.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/world/coronavirus-news.html
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