Facebook employees in the Bay Area and across the U.S. won't return to the social media giant’s offices before next year, as the company confirmed Thursday it will push back an in-office return due to the continued spread of the COVID-19 delta variant.
Spokesperson Chloe Meyere said in a statement to KCBS Radio that U.S. employees won’t be required back in the office until January 2022, and Facebook also expects that to be the case in other countries.
"Data, not dates, is what drives our approach for returning to the office," she said, with the company primarily monitoring local cases, vaccination rates and ICU capacity, among other metrics.
Facebook in June said all employees whose roles could be performed out of the office would be able to request to work remotely. That same month, the company said it was on track to reopen all of its U.S. offices prior to October, but the spread of the delta variant forced a number of tech companies – including many based locally – to change their plans.
Last month, Facebook announced employees returning to offices would be required to be vaccinated against COVID-19. That same day, Twitter announced it was closing its San Francisco and New York offices “until further notice” while Google pushed back its reopening until at least Oct. 18 and announced workers returning to the search giant’s offices would need to be vaccinated.
In just over two weeks since those announcements, coronavirus cases have spiked nationwide. The U.S. is consistently averaging more cases every seven days than it did last summer, though new cases and deaths are far off the country’s winter peak, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said Thursday at a White House briefing that hospitalizations increased 30%, with 90% of counties now having what the agency defines as substantial or high transmission. Only one in 10 counties, in other words, are averaging fewer than 50 cases per 100,000 people or have a positivity rate lower than 8%.
Facebook has nine offices in five Bay Area counties (Alameda, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara), each of which currently has a high rate of spread.
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