Amazon closes New Jersey warehouse after COVID-19 outbreak

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Amazon is closing one of its warehouses in New Jersey due to an uptick in COVID-19 cases, the company said Sunday.
The facility in Robbinsville Township will be closed until December 26, CNBC reported.
As of October, nearly 20,000 Amazon employees had confirmed cases of COVID-19.
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Amazon is suspending operations at a warehouse in New Jersey after detecting an uptick in positive test results for COVID-19, the company said Sunday.

The facility, in Robbinsville Township, will be closed until just after Christmas.

A spokesperson for the online giant told CNBC that the company had identified an outbreak among workers who were not showing any signs of infection.

"Through our in-house COVID-19 testing program, we detected an increase in the number of asymptomatic positive cases at our PNE5 facility in northern New Jersey and have proactively closed the site until December 26th out of an abundance of caution," the spokesperson said.

The company did not respond to Business Insider's request for the number of cases at the facility or the test positivity rate that caused it to temporarily shutter the workplace.

Amazon said it would continue paying the workers who have been ordered to remain home.

Over the summer, the company ceased paying those employees any hazard pay, after earlier in the pandemic providing a $2-an-hour boost in compensation.

Buoyed by online shoppers sheltering in place, Amazon in October reported its second straight quarter of records sales and profits, The Seattle Times reported. The same month, the company revealed that nearly 20,000 of its employees had contracted the coronavirus.

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