Amazon begins temperature checks and will provide surgical masks at warehouses

How are they so late on this? I thought Bezos was going to be all over figuring out how to keep people working safely, that's going to be a huge factor in the success or failure of businesses going forward.

It is funny you mention it. My SO works at a doctor's office and they only started that kind of monitoring two days ago. Best practices are only starting to emerge so I am willing to give Amazon some slack here.

It is still late.

The temperature checks and reviewing video are new, but they've been saying they will provide masks for a while but have been running into shortages actually procuring them.

If we assume most transmission is asymptomatic, this is largely a PR move that buys Amazon some time, but doesn't change much, except maybe the price they're willing to pay for masks.

They're late because employee protests forced their hand.

Private companies are reluctant to instate costly efforts on their own. They might be worried competitors will get an edge by not doing the same.

In a crisis, people look to the leadership above them. These companies are looking to government and public health officials for guidance and even official decrees. But those people are scrambling to make up for the month of prep work we lost. This pandemic has revealed our lack of planning for disasters. We're just now settling on the big decisions like stay-at-home orders and financial relief. Hopefully we'll get to the secondary decisions (like recommended protocols for businesses still open) while they could still do some good.

Even if we assume most transmission is asymptomatic there's still a ton of value in cutting down symptomatic transmission.