Elon Musk’s decision to reopen Tesla’s Bay Area manufacturing facility in May last year, despite the county’s orders, was followed by more than 100 COVID-19 cases at the plant, according to newly released data. After repeatedly protesting local lockdown measures, Tesla’s CEO stated in May, as coronavirus cases spread across the country, that the company would restart production today against Alameda County rules. The Fremont plant, with about 10,000 employees, had registered about 10 cases of the virus that month, but the number of cases grew steadily thereafter, eventually reaching 125 by December, according to county health data released Friday by transparency website PlainSite.
The number of cases jumped to 19 in June, then rose to 58 in July, before reaching 86 in August, according to the data. Several workers at the factory protested last summer after saying that employees who accepted the company’s offer to stay at home over fears of COVID had been terminated in apparent retaliation. Musk himself has come under repeated fire for rejecting the severity of the virus, and famously predicted last March that the nation would have fallen “close to zero” by April. On Friday, even as data revealed a spike in cases at the Fremont plant, he was back at it, suggesting unfounded on Twitter that the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine could not be trusted.
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