Elon Musk’s Tesla reopens followed by spike in COVID cases, report says

Elon Musk’s decision to reopen the Tesla’s Bay Area production plant last May despite county lockdown orders was followed by more than 100 cases of COVID-19 at the plant, according to new data. After repeatedly criticizing local lockdown measures, the Tesla CEO said in May, as coronavirus cases spread across the country, that the company would “restart production today against county rules. ‘Alameda’. The Fremont plant, with around 10,000 employees, had recorded about 10 cases of the virus that month, but the number of cases rose steadily thereafter, eventually reaching 125 in December, according to county health data released on Friday. through the PlainSite transparency website.

The number of cases rose to 19 in June, then to 58 in July before reaching 86 in August, the data showed. Several factory workers protested last summer after saying that employees who accepted the company’s offer to stay at home over fear of COVID were fired in apparent retaliation. Musk himself has been repeatedly criticized for dismissing the severity of the virus, and he predicted last March that the country would have “near zero” cases by April. On Friday, even as data revealed a spike in cases at the Fremont plant, he was back there, baselessly suggesting on Twitter that the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine should not be trusted.