Fremont Tesla workers tested positive for coronavirus days after plant reopened
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
According to the county dashboard, Alameda County had 2,564 cases on May 20, 2 days after Tesla reopened: https://ac-hcsa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html...
With a population of 1,671,000, that means about 0.15% of Alameda County residents had been diagnosed with covid-19 at that point.
So we could reasonably expect 15 cases out of the 10,000 employees at Tesla's factory.
Why the breathless article about 2 cases?
Because articles are now written to confirm people's preconceived notions. Articles that confirm your biases are more likely to be shared than articles which don't.
Look at comments in forums...in that case, people have no profit motive, although they do have a "get upvotes" motive (so, virtue signalling is a legit motive, to some degree, but one notion to consider is that people very often no longer discriminate between that which is concrete factual and that which is inferred (imagined) "factual". If you look for it, you'll see that this behaviour is everywhere.
Don't tell authors to take extreme stances, just ensure that stories get assigned to the ones that have strong views about the topic.
Even better, let the authors themselves decide what to cover. They will pretty quickly focus on their pet political propaganda and produce the click bait needed to drive eyes.
a) good/popular writing style
b) an ideologue in subjects that have high ideological "weight" in the population
Honesty, accuracy, fact checking, nuance, all of the traditional desirable attributes for journalists are now not only not required, but extremely undesirable.
And depending on the particular organization (say, a relatively reputable organization like the NYT), the only thing you need are editors who can proofread the article before publishing, replacing explicit assertions with a variety of weasel words, a big chunk of which could likely even be automated to insert suggested edits that just need a manual review.
The journalist spoke with two workers within the production facility. "One of the workers said a supervisor confirmed two positive cases to a group at the Fremont-based seat assembly facility" This is an example of just one supervisor confirming two positive cases. It is likely that there are many more.
Furthermore, "But because Tesla restarted production a week earlier, there could have been cases that were never reported to the county because Tesla was “not required to directly report known cases” before the agreement, county officials said."
Otherwise, this literally means nothing.
If they were confirmed not-positive before the reopening how come this information was not publicly made available beforehand? If they weren't tested and then went back to work during the reopening, doesn't this indicate a lack of diligence in screening returning employees?
In any case the main issue is that Musk reopened the plant against local authorities' wishes and thus the consequences of such action should be held under scrutiny.
The main issue for you, perhaps, is violating authorities “wishes”. Wishes, because in fact it wasn’t illegal.. freedom of assembly gives us that, we aren’t in wartime, and until tested in court those local orders are just recommendations that need be judged in court... where they’d be struck down.
Not that they weren’t good common sense at the time, but the coronavirus very clearly now is not only a smaller risk than we thought, but also only specifically a risk to very certain vulnerable groups who are easy to identify.
If you are so worried about authorities’ wishes, I wonder what you think of the protests? Do you think the authorities’ wishes were generally right in the case of George Floyd? Should the protestors have been rounded up for violating wishes and causing massive risk? Seems you care a ton about people not dying from the virus, so I’d assume so.
I get that the government needed to react quickly and impose emergency measures. But now that things have calmed down, we should apply the same standards to business closures that we do to everything else: governments must justify why a business cannot reopen, must apply the rules consistently and fairly to every business, and can be challenged when they don't live up to those obligations.
Possibly. The employees could have contracted the virus outside work.
> the company had reported several cases of the coronavirus, and the employees affected were told to stay home.
I'm self-employed and my little software company took a sharp hit with the pandemic. Not being one to wait until all the money runs out, I took an "essential job" stocking groceries at the nearby Walmart. Every day, before employees can enter the store, they are screened. In the time I have been there, several employees failed the screening and were sent home. Two of those turned out to have the virus.
Tesla and other employers have similar screenings, so unless the employees lied about being symptomatic, they should not have been among the workforce. Add to that, the CDC just announced findings that non-symptomatic spread of the virus was very rare.
I also struggle to find examples that do count, nowadays. Most of what I see is "narrative pushing."
That's a fallacious appeal to authority if I've ever seen one. The Washington Post and most other newspapers publish plenty of crap in addition to serious journalism, and they aren't above publishing clickbait to drive ad revenue.
I ask again, what would be required for this piece to "count as journalism"?
It doesn't matter where it came from. Some publications just have different ratios of biased crap and the biases are different depending on the institution.
Here is a more precise but still infuriating headline.
If I worked at Tesla and came to find out about positive tests in this manner, in an environment with what appears to be a more rapid return to work inclination, I might breathlessly express my concern to as many as would listen.
I don't find that offensive.
Alameda county has had 2564 cases in total since March (up to May 20th) -- so you'd have expected 15 employees to have tested positive for COVID since March. This is a very different statement than 2 of its employees have tested positive shortly after it re-opened.
Loosely one might compare it to those that tested positive in the week of May 20th, which, according to your link, is about 400-500 new cases (about 5x fewer than the cumulative total). So you might reasonably expect something like ~3 cases if you assume the Tesla workers had the same positive test rate as the general population of the county.
Is this referring to this tweet (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1259945593805221891) that said "Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules. I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me." ?
Edit - here's an interesting question - how many lives is accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy worth? Climate change is surely going to cost lives. Tesla also isn't really the best solution in my mind. I think we should all live in denser cities where you can walk, bike, and use transit.
that is the lunacy of the closings, they lack logic, as in rules being used and implied risk against other types of businesses opening have been glossed over for those already deemed essential.
Musk was one of the few business owners to seriously push back against local authorities who made unjustifiable restrictions. More people would be grateful to him for doing that if he wasn't so ridiculous in other aspects of his public life.
Who decides what's reasonable? To me, "reasonable" might mean, "precautions that minimize unnecessary risk to human morbidity and mortality". Even if we were to agree on this, what do "minimize" and "unnecessary" mean? And how do we take into account second-order effects, like, maybe my workplace is primarily young people and there's relatively low risk of long-term harm, but my employees might spread the virus in the community...
> it is far easier to contain the issue in a factory floor than the supermarket
Although this claim has some logic to it, I'm not sure it is actually true. See the outbreaks at meatpacking plants, https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/06/08/cache-valley-providin..., https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/08/us/meat-proce...
That's the thing about this novel virus. There is a lot of uncertainty.
These are all hard questions. I'm not pretending that health officials have uniformly made the right call, or even good calls. I am saying that if you think it's as simple as stating the policy "let anyone taking reasonable precautions open for business", I have a bridge to sell you.
Good, then don't pretend that it's wrong to push back when health officials inconsistently apply their rules and cannot justify them when challenged.
The Washington Post: Tesla defied county orders so it could restart production. Days later, workers tested positive for the coronavirus.. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/09/tesla-f...
Furthermore it is a extremely strong coincidence that this article comes out five days after Musk seemingly randomly attacks Amazon: https://nationalpost.com/technology/elon-musk-amazon-feud-je...
It certainly matches Musk's regular habit of lashing out at his critiques...
This is the new normal. We can't stay in lockdown forever. Jobs deemed "non-essential" by white collar professionals comfortably working from home are pretty essential to the workers who have been stuck at home without an income.
Until a vaccine is developed, people will get sick even if they are social distancing and wearing masks and their workplaces are doing the right things. We shouldn't be shocked or outraged or self-righteous when that happens. Society needs to accept that or we will never recover from the lockdowns.
Ultimately, local authorities couldn't make a compelling case that opening the Tesla factory was risky enough to justify intervening. They had already allowed a number of other businesses to open that were more dangerous in terms of covid transmission than the Tesla factory and could also be called "non-essential". Tesla was taking the same precautions that local authorities recommended for other businesses they allowed to open.
Different companies have different roles to play. And if shutting down non-essentials can reduce the rate of infection, it improve the outcome for _everyone_ afterwards.
For how long? What if there is never a vaccine? Will we hide in our homes forever?
There is a reason California is reopening. Lockdowns just can't last forever. We have to move on and do the best we can to live with the virus as a normal part of life, even though it means more people are going to get sick.
We should also all be uncomfortable with the government deciding which companies deserve to survive. We are supposed to have a market economy. We can put up with those kinds of government controls as short-term emergency measures, but they would cause economic collapse in the long term.
Indeed. The purpose of the lockdown was to buy us time to build e.g. contract tracing infrastructure, massively expand testing, and develop other means to allow us to reopen safely.
Instead for the most part we've sat on our hands and done very little. Thus we're saying, well, sucks to be us, I guess we have to reopen and let people die.
It didn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way. There is plenty of evidence of this from around the world.
But it is this way, so what's your point?
We can wish all we want for things to be better, but we have to start reopening no matter what. The economy will collapse if we don't. We are out of time.
There's a middle ground between "no attempt made to mitigate the loss of human life" and "safe and effective vaccine readily available". We can and should be doing more.
It's also not too late to do more.
But instead, we seem to be adopting the nihilism that I read in your original post, that, (in a few ways) time's up.
Some individuals/business-owners doing what they can to mitigate loss of life caused by the reopening of their businesses, yes. Some people are wearing masks.
This is by no means universal. You don't have to go far to see videos from Vegas, or of airlines not enforcing their own mask policies.
And also, as a society we absolutely are not doing what we can to mitigate loss of life even within the parameters of a fixed amount of economic activity.
>it improve the outcome for _everyone_ afterwards
Certainly not for the people who are forced to shutdown.
I think you're probably right; this is the new normal. Lockdowns will be lifted as people come to accept covid deaths as normalcy, as they already accept influenza deaths, car accidents, etc.
Maybe we are the problem.
Fact: National Enquirer has been A/B testing since the grandparents of the founders of Facebook were in diapers.
This is literally a local TV evening news story.
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2020-06-06
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/06/06/wind-baffles-on...
I remember the local Bay Area station having the best coverage of the Mountain View fatal autopilot crash, e.g. they talked to the family and found the victim had reported several problems in the area before:
The state approved Tesla to work. It's the county that is concerned. But if you decline to come to work, just know you will not receive benefits and you will be unable to apply for unemployment since we have work available. We can't force you to come in if you don't feel comfortable.
Interesting account there ...
Statistically the 2 cases at Tesla is an order of magnitude less than what you'd expect giving the factory size (10000) and the population size of the Alameda county (1.6M) and the infection rate there (4000).
This is why I say that unless there is a significant change in control of productive property, when that productive property deprecates human labor, those who rely on trading their time for money will be in dire situations.
(Descendants; ancestors are those in the past.)
a good start would be to pay well for that work.
> There's something wrong with our civilization when some people have to go in for the increased risk to their health for $15+ just to feed their families while we comfortably and safely sit at home getting paid multiples of that and ride that great stock market.
This isn't a jab at workers needing to go back to work, this is a jab at the fact that we treat retail workers like garbage when in reality our society would crumble without them. The whole "just get a better job if you want to be paid more" argument levied at those who push for a higher minimum wage not only ignores the fact that, when in poverty, it's very hard to get a "better job", but also ignores the fact that these jobs are necessary. Somebody has to do them. Why are sanitation workers getting paid less than stock brokers when sanitation workers are doing objectively harder work and are at far more risk (especially now)?
> perhaps you can invent a society where the work needed to live can get done without any humans doing work.
No, I'll invent a society where people whose job it is to move money around are paid substantially less than retail workers or janitors, and where those that do labor like this are respected more highly than someone like Warren Buffet or Crissy Teigen.
do you propose to pay sanitation workers hundreds of thousands of dollars a piece, in which case i can't imagine how city budgets will survive, or forcibly lower the salaries of financial workers to below that of the sanitation workers? in which case we'll have little to no financial services anymore.