As the number of confirmed coronavirus cases continues to rise in the United States, Amazon and Facebook are asking their Seattle employees to work from home.
Washington state has become an epicenter for COVID-19 in the U.S., with 39 diagnoses and 10 deaths as of Thursday. Both Facebook and Amazon confirmed earlier this week that at least one of their Seattle-based workers have tested positive for the virus.
“We are changing Amazon’s guidance to recommend that all employees based in Seattle/Bellevue who work in a role that can be done from home, do so starting now through the end of the of March,” Amazon said in an email to its employees on Wednesday that was obtained by GeekWire.
“We’ve notified our employees and are following the advice of public health officials to prioritize everyone’s health and safety,” Facebook said in a statement.
Amazon and Facebook are among dozens of other tech companies throughout the country currently encouraging employees to work from home, including Microsoft offices in Seattle and San Francisco and Indeed in Austin.
Some Seattle-area schools are also following suit. The Northshore School District announced Wednesday it will be closing all 33 of its schools for the next two weeks, transferring coursework to a cloud-based platform starting on March 9.
The district held an all-day training session for teachers on Tuesday to help them make the transition to virtual education. Students who need help getting devices or internet connection during the closure were asked to fill out this form.
“Let me be clear: Education is a service to which our district is resolutely committed. It is not a place. To that end, we are shifting our education from the classroom with four walls to the cloud,” Superintendent Michelle Reid said in a statement. “We are taking this strategic approach not because we think by doing so, we will stop an epidemic; we are simply trying to do our part to slow the spread of COVID-19.”
