Apple has temporarily closed three retail stores in the U.S. and Canada after a rise in employee COVID-19 cases and exposures.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
The three stores are in the Brickell City Centre in Miami; Annapolis, Maryland; and downtown Ottawa. The company said that all employees will take Covid-19 tests prior to the stores reopening and that it’s staying in touch with the affected workers. Store closures due to a rise in internal Covid cases typically last for a few days.
On Tuesday, Apple restored its mask mandate for shoppers at all U.S. retail locations and told employees it would begin proactively limiting how many customers it will allow in its stores at one time.
Apple recently started requiring employees, regardless of vaccination status, to take rapid tests for Covid multiple times per week before coming to work. It also asks employees who feel sick to stay home. The company is aiming to require corporate employees to return to the office by Feb. 1.
MacDailyNews Take: Obviously, if Apple cannot assemble the staff for specific locations due to COVID cases, they cannot open the stores.
That said:
He was writing about a different “disaster,” but, going on two years worth of “two weeks to slow the spread,” Adam Gopnik’s words from August 2011 are a rather interesting read and something to keep in mind as you consume “news” media:
[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios — the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about — was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things…
That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preemptive paranoia. The real purpose not to get you to do anything, but to get you so scared that all you can do is keep the television, or radio, on. This is obvious, and yet there is something truly helpful, really instructive, about experiencing it again after a month of absence and silence. Two things that ought to be apparent all the time become briefly clear to you again. First, that the media, television particularly, are amplifying devices in which tiny kernels of information become vast, terrifying structures of speculation. The news business is one in which a minimum of news is really given the business.
And second, that the reasons for this are essentially non-ideological; frightened people need news for reassurance, and want to get a more heightened experience by being frightened still more, and the business the people supplying the fright are in (which we’re in too, of course) is not really that of dispensing information but of assembling enough listeners or readers, preferably still caught in that same spirit of credulous attentiveness, to offer to advertisers or keep subscribing. — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, August 28, 2011
As we wrote back on March 9, 2020: The real virus is the panic.
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STUPID,STUPID,STUPID, Commie Timmy is trying to keep the scam going!
Calling the CEO of the American corporation with the largest market cap a “communist” is such a huge stretch, Reed Richards and Bob Parr are both jealous.
It can’t last forever. Sooner or later the drug companies will be begging us to not give them any more money…probably later.
It has to last until November 6, 2024.
Gee, I thought it was supposed to end on November 4, 2020..
How’s that working out for you Trumpers?
It’s a panic-demic. Where’s Douglas Adams when you need him? We need a Don’t Panic-demic.
In the U.S., it’s the “progressive” northeast that’s being hit by rising COVID cases.
So, the corporate media virtually ignores it. This gets nowhere near the amount of coverage as it would if this were Florida or the South. The COVID spikes are not happening in areas where the deplorables (sane Americans) live.
In the areas that are mask-obsessed, COVID-obsessed, and jab-obsessed, COVID cases are engulfing them like the Great Flood.
Fact: Cold and flu-like viruses thrive this time of the season. COVID cases spiked last year around this time as well. It happens.
Omicron is a weak variant. Let it circulate. That, not what Apple and the rest of the leftists are doing, is what will greatly help to finally bring an end to this endless overreaction charade.
Thank you for all you have done to allow me to spread by burning masks and repeating lies that I don’t exist. I would hate for you to get your freedom back to go to restaurants, the movies, and gather with friends. The more you deny me, the more I can spread. I need people like you stupid enough to make sure I never disappear.
It doesn’t matter if you believe in me, because I don’t care. See you in the overcrowded hospitals.
Which medical professional or scientist has said covid is going to disappear? First I have heard of that. How exactly is covid going to disappear? So, “smart people” are going to make itdisappear? How does that work; is covid stupid? Have the mumps, flu or measles disappeared? Are they smarter than covid?
No scientist has said it. However, many members of one particular political party have, indeed, said it, starting with the President.
Some viruses do disappear. Smallpox has been eradicated. Measles, Mumps and German Measles were ALMOST eradicated through universal vaccination programs, but the original antivax movement (thank you to Dr. Suzanne Somers and Dr. Jenny McCarthy) has allowed their resurgence, albeit in very low numbers.
Stupid to sacrifice making sales for the Christmas rush, just over a virus that is harmless and has killed no one at all. This is all government bs to control people and no one is obligated to comply with ANYTHING JOE BIDEN SAYS, NO STATE GOVERNMENT OR LOCAL GOVERNMENT AT ALL. THEY HAVE ZERO AUTHORITY OVER WHAT ANYONE EVER DOES AT ANY TIME. NO ONE SHOULD EVER GET TESTED OR VACCINATED FOR ANYTHING.