Although it is approaching the end of the year, the epidemic has not only not been contained, but has even completely broken out! Amazon was even forced to close an FBA warehouse in northern New Jersey because of the epidemic! The number of the closed FBA warehouse is PNE5. The official news is that it may be closed until the 26th. During this period, the warehouse will not carry out any activities, including the warehousing of goods and order delivery. However, the workers in the warehouse can still get their salaries as usual during the closure.
The closure of the warehouse only happened once in March when the epidemic in the United States was the worst. At that time, the warehouse SDF9 in Kentucky was urgently closed for several days, and it was delayed during the period. It was not reopened until early April.
Now Amazon refuses to disclose the specific number of infections and response in PNE5. We can only infer the situation of SDF9 last time. This time the warehouse will be closed at least until the official date (26th). If the situation does not improve, it may be delayed for one or two days.
As we introduced earlier, more than 20,000 warehouse workers at Amazon have been diagnosed, and the infection rate is more than 40% higher than the national average. In this way, Amazon has an average of nearly 200 confirmed cases in each of its more than 100 FBA warehouses in the United States. This is the data from the beginning of this month. The situation in the United States has been even more terrible in the past two days, breaking the record for single-day confirmed cases several times.
As of the 19th, US time, the number of newly confirmed cases in the United States has exceeded 400,000 per day! What is the concept of 400,000 new cases a day? The new infections every day exceed one thousandth of the total number of people in the United States! And this number is still rising. In addition, the vaccine has not been delivered to the states on time and in quantity due to logistics and other reasons. The local epidemic in the United States is still running wildly and there is no trend of stopping at the cliff.
This is already a very tragic battle, but local residents in the United States seem a little indifferent, and continue to go further and further on the road of “pursuing freedom”. Just last weekend, more than one million people traveled by plane in the United States for two consecutive days. Most local Americans chose to ignore the warnings issued by the public health department and chose to travel or go home for vacation during the Christmas holiday.
The impact of this wave of personnel movement will not be reflected until the end of the month, when there will be another wave of terrifying infection peaks.
Last time we said that Amazon failed to get priority vaccination for warehouse workers. In yesterday’s vote, the CDC gave the second wave of priority vaccination (Phase 1B) to other positions, including firefighters, police officers, teachers, grocery workers and postal workers. Amazon warehouse employees are expected to be in the third batch of priority vaccination (Phase 1C).
The first wave of priority vaccination is in December and is now underway. The second wave is expected to start in January and will not provide all vaccine production capacity until mid-February, while the third phase of priority vaccination for Amazon warehouse and logistics workers may have to wait until mid-February to March.
This is still the case if the vaccine can be produced and transported as planned, and the warehouse workers can be arranged in March. At present, there is no big problem on the production side, but the logistics situation across the United States has really delayed the distribution of vaccines. So whether Amazon employees can get the vaccine in March is still unknown.
The closure of PNE5 is just the first thunder of this wave of epidemic outbreak. The situation that our cross-border sellers will face next may be even worse! We remind all Amazon sellers to pay attention to their inventory status and local logistics timeliness in the near future and make preparations in advance.