It means there is coronavirus at the Tesla plant. To give an example which way it goes: in Poland, the virus appeared a few weeks ago between coal mines workers. Yesterday there was a decision to temporarily shut 12 coal mines down.
> 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.
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 employees were and are free to do as they wish.
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.
In a free and democratic society it is the authorities who need to be held under scrutiny.
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.