Elon Musk’s decision to reopen the Tesla Bay Area production plant last May, despite requests by the county to block, was followed by more than 100 COVID-19 boxes at the plant, according to newly released data. After repeatedly protesting local blocking measures, Tesla’s CEO declared in May, as coronavirus cases spread across the country, that the company would be “restarting production today against Alameda County rules.” The Fremont plant, with approximately 10,000 employees, recorded about 10 cases of the virus that month, but the number of cases has grown steadily since then, finally reaching 125 in December, according to county health data released on the transparency website. PlainSite on Friday.
The number of cases jumped to 19 in June and then rose to 58 in July, before reaching 86 in August, according to the data. Several factory workers protested last summer after saying that employees who accepted the company’s offer to stay at home due to COVID’s fears were ended in apparent retaliation. Musk himself was repeatedly criticized for ignoring the severity of the virus, and he predicted last March that the country would have “almost zero” cases by April. On Friday, even as the data revealed an increase in cases at the Fremont plant, he was back, suggesting without Twitter that the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine was unreliable.
Read on The Wshington Post