Like the bodies, Amazon packages just keep piling up all over town. Around a third of all Americans are Amazon Prime members, and coronavirus has rendered us even more dependent on the behemoth retailer. The New York Times reports that the volume of grocery orders through Amazon has been fifty times higher than usual during our coronavirus isolation. Amazon has been one of COVID-19’s major beneficiaries — along with Zoom, of course — as local retailers have either been ordered closed or have seemed increasingly unsafe.

As capital tends to do, Amazon has been reaping all the profits and allowing its employees to assume all the risk. Workers say that warehouses have been kept open even as workers test positive for the virus, and that with an extremely stingy sick-leave policy, many Amazon employees have been coming to work with symptoms. Christian Smalls, an assistant manager at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, who Meagan Day interviewed at length for Jacobin last week, told me on Sunday night that thirty of his coworkers there had tested positive for the coronavirus.

He has been leading his coworkers in walkouts and rallies at the warehouse, demanding that the facility be shut down and sanitized, and all the workers under paid quarantine for two weeks. The company fired Smalls, and a leaked memo of a meeting with Amazon officials revealed that instead of discussing what they were going to do to save workers’ lives, they plotted how to discredit Smalls. The company has repeatedly claimed to the media that Smalls was fired for violating safety measures. Meanwhile, as Smalls points out, more and more people are “at risk of death” due to the company’s inaction. New York state and city government are investigating Amazon’s retaliation against Smalls.