After reopening in May in defiance of the Department of Health’s orders, Tesla’s plant in Fremont, California saw 450 cases of COVID-19 through December 2020. new data from the legal website PlainSite shows (via The Washington Post).
Last March, public health officials in Alameda County, where the Fremont plant is located, restricted to all essential businesses as the cases of coronavirus increased across the country. Tesla fought the order, but eventually the plant closed on March 23rd. But a few days later, Tesla resumed production at the Fremont plant, even though it violated public health orders. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter at the time that he planned to be with Fremont workers on the factory floor and harassed local officials to arrest him.
Tesla’s reopening plan was later approved, even though it was already in defiance of the March orders. Musk, an outspoken critic of last year’s coronavirus shelters, has threatened to move the Fremont plant out of California. Tesla filed a lawsuit against Alameda County on May 9 last year, but dropped the case less than two weeks later.
The comments reports that documents obtained by PlainSite show that Tesla had about a dozen reports of COVID-19 cases in May 2020, and that numbers continued to rise in December, a month that saw 125 new cases of the virus seen in the plant. Tesla employs about 10,000 people at the Fremont facility.