Amazon begins temperature checks and will provide surgical masks at warehouses

How is this just starting? Here in Singapore, employers have been required to do twice-daily temperature checks for months.

This is the lowest of low-hanging fruit.

>How is this just starting?

I wonder if this is because of shortages of masks.

> How is this just starting?

This question bears repeating. A lot. I'm baffled.

I asked the same thing over 3 weeks ago, and the general response on HN was interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22543327

The US in general is very conservative about allowing people sick leave, and Amazon in particular is notorious for making people work while sick. They were already running their operation right on the edge of the health of their employees, e.g. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/3/11/18260472/amazon-ware...

The hard part isn't testing the workers. It's giving them sick pay for not coming in to work while sick.

Thermal guns are not affected by shortages of masks.

That said, we probably don't have sufficient supplies of those on hand either.

That's one of the most frustrating things about the response to this. Even now we don't have measures like having everyone wear face coverings, having temperature checks, limiting the number of people in establishments, etc., and it doesn't seem like anyone in power is advocating them at the moment. The response seems to be to first shut down the whole economy, then spend a few weeks thinking about what to do next.

I think the "begins" in the title is misleading. I have been seeing plenty of reports on reddit from Amazon warehouse workers saying they have been doing temp checks (and other measures) for at least a couple weeks. I know in some jurisdictions it is required for any business that stays open to do temperature checks.

My guess is that some Amazon warehouses were doing it, but not all. This news seems to be about rolling out an Amazon-wide policy, but the headline makes it seem like there were no measures prior to this (which AFAIK is false).

This is quite interesting phenomenon, how did mainstream media manage to spread the same mis-information for weeks?

Did they have a meeting together and agreed to carry out the same lie for the greater good???

Are you under the impression that nine million people from 60,000 organizations got together to keep the same conspiracy?

>how did mainstream media manage to spread the same mis-information for weeks?

By quoting our leaders.

>Thermal guns are not affected by shortages of masks.

Well ... they are certainly correlated.

They're not in a conspiracy or even in communication, they're applying the same world-view that responds similarly when presented with the same incentives.

This is why it doesn't help as much as you'd expect to provide better information, to expose a prominent member of the 'conspiracy' in a lie, or even to outright replace the public policy - the same culture and the same systems are still out there, resulting in a large fraction of the population reaching the same conclusions. Only education and cultural change (which are slow, operating on timescales of decades) can overcome this problem.

I can relate to the frustration. The one observation I would make is that the US is not Singapore. Singapore is a relatively small city-state, run by a benevolent dictatorship and with relatively recent experience with other corona viruses.

There is no shortage of masks, just issues of procurement.

Masks are being sold to overseas buyers, so I assume they can resell them back to US entities at enormous markups.

The article notes: "Employees will also be provided with surgical masks starting next week, the company says, once it receives shipments of orders of “millions” placed a few weeks ago."

Companies have been trying to do whatever they can. But there are limits to what they can do. A warehouse only has so much room to keep distance while still satisfying the needs of customers. And PPE is in short supply. It makes sense that it would take weeks to source equipment at this time.

Everyone is complaining and protesting but the reality is the companies have already been doing what they can, by and large.

well, this comes from WHO. i honestly don't understand why they're lying. maybe to stop people for buying al masks? but this is incredibly stupid, there are textile masks too that don't help a lot, but still do a little, as it limits the distance that the virus is expelled to (and if everyone wears them, everybody gets protected because the people with the virus will have a smaller air spreading area around them).

Singapore is run by competent people and the US is not.

Simple as that.

Ultimately amazon is a very large company and is responsible for all the warehouses and laborers it makes use of. The problem is that these laborers are treated unfairly.

Who needs sick time should able to take it and it should be paid time off; Amazon workers are not well off people, they live paycheck to paycheck. By taking sick leave would leave them without a rent check, Some of them would think twice, some would just come to work sick. And why don't they do something like an incentive program for workers? To give protective equipment to their workers, give a bonus for working during the pandemic and charge more for shipping if needed. Yes we will be charged more, we would buy less but the numbers would balance out. And knowing those workers are human to, I wouldnt mind paying more for shipping just to mitigate their impasse.

Here's my pet theory: It's mostly about preserving companies' brands and not associating them with the crisis. Someone wearing a face mask is a very visible (literally in-your-face) expression of the pandemic. Companies don't want this associated with their various brands. Especially a service worker working directly with the public. [Company] fears that if the public starts seeing [Company] workers wearing masks, they'll associate [Company] with sickness. Remember the thread yesterday about hospitals. The health care workers that were willing to post anonymously suggested that their lack of protective gear was more about bad PR and image than a lack of supplies.

This is just like companies not wanting their ads to show up alongside porn or hate videos. They're trying to avoid a bad brand association. No company wants the public to see face masks all over their brand.

I want to print and frame this comment.

I think everyone is aware that America has a couple of structural issues that have existed and slowly gotten worse over the last decades. For example, the cost of healthcare and education keeps rising, while real incomes stay stagnant.

It feels like this is how we solve problems in America:

1. Organize a private think tank 2. Think tank recommends some targeted market or incentive-based intervention 3. Intervention is watered down through the political process 4. Problem finds a new equilibrium

We're culturally resistant to solutions that require:

1. Mass social compliance (e.g, stay at home) 2. Trust in higher authorities 3. Capping potential best outcomes (we are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires)

It's a cultural thing. In America, Asian Americans were wearing face masks starting around January (many wear them all year round). Non-asian Americans don't like to, for whatever reason.

Singapore and much of Southeast Asia learned their lesson with SARS, so they have been prepared for a long time. Temperature tracking has not been uncommon in those areas prior to COVID-19. They understand the importance of monitoring and early action.

It's crazy that the only people in power talking about reopening the economy are the ones who advocate taking less precautions.

I hope the public conversation will shift towards a culture of wearing face covers and having temperature checks and that governments will mobilize to make it happen. The status quo can't hold for 18 months while we test the vaccines.

A lot of actual Asians in the US, not just "Asian-Americans", are wearing masks too.

Sorry, it is my pet peeve when people assume that everyone living in the US is "American".

I mean, sure, but most Asians in the US are citizens.

What papers someone has is an administrative matter that does not perfectly correlate with what nation they culturally identify with.

I think there are many people who, despite having US passports, identify more readily as "Chinese" than "Chinese-American".

I doubt it. Most Chinese Americans hate the CCP and want nothing to do with China, since most are descended from the original chinese settlers of the west, not recent immigrants.

And plus, as an Asian american myself, I don't think that an American born person of Asian ethnicity is Asian, so please don't racesplain to me.

There seems to be a lot of off-topic Amazon-hate in this thread.

If they weren't born here, and became Citizens, they took an oath to support the Constitution and renounce any fidelity to any other nation. Being a Citizen is more than just a piece of paper.

How Amazon treats its warehouse workers seems relevant and topical to a thread about a change in how it is treating its workers.

American cars didn’t use to have seat belts. The thinking was, if your car is equipped with seat belts, it’s clearly not safe.