giant eagle, a grocery store chain with stores in five eastern and midwestern states, has announced that five employees have tested positive for covid-19, all coming from different stores. giant eagle has also launched a page on their website that gives the location of the store, the last known date the employee was in the store, and the date covid-19 was confirmed.
a surplus of grocery store workers getting the virus is expected, yes? this virus is going to keep infecting people, as the numbers show, and it's not going to infect the people who are staying home (yet). but have any other grocery stores been transparent about how many and what stores the infected workers were in? do they have a ethical obligation to do that? do we have an ethical obligation to force them to do that if they don't? props to giant eagle for this, but it should be noted that they are deleting the store from the database on this webpage only five days after they've sanitized the store. i'm going to bookmark it and check it daily for the next couple of weeks. this certainly won't start a trend; i don't believe employers are going to keep the public informed on how many of their employees have caught the virus. but it's nice to see the transparency here.