Nearly 4,000 workers were initially told to isolate themselves.
Thousands of Amazon employees in the UK were told to isolate themselves after COVID-19 tests initially came back positive – but it turned out to be a false alarm.
A spokesperson for the UK Department of Health and Social Care told ABC News that on February 13, about 3,853 Amazon employees were told they had tested positive, but the department said later that evening that they had actually tested negative.
“NHS Test and Trace worked closely with Amazon and promptly notified affected employees to let them know they did not need to isolate,” the spokesman said in a statement.
Amazon has not specified where in the UK the affected employees worked or what their roles are.
The e-commerce giant has a workplace testing program, rolled out last fall, that uses PCR testing. The company has reported positive cases to Public Health England daily, and the agency manages the transfer of that data to the National Health Service Test and Trace.
“We have communicated with our employees and partners to support them in the correct action steps, as instructed by the NHS,” Amazon said in a statement.
The UK is fighting its own variant of the coronavirus which health experts say is more contagious and spreading to other parts of the world. However, health data from the UK government indicates that COVID-19 cases and deaths have declined.
There were 86,321 new cases reported in the country in the past seven days, down nearly 28% from the previous week, according to the data. According to the British government, there were 4,345 deaths in the past week, a decrease of 25% from the week before.
According to health data, as of Monday evening, 15,576,107 residents had received their first vaccination shot.