After a Google employee was tested positive for novel coronavirus at its Bengaluru office, the tech giant has urged its employees to work from him. The company in a statement said the employee has been quarantined and the company has asked others who came in contact with him to quarantine themselves.
"We can confirm that an employee from our Bangalore office has been diagnosed with COVID-19. They were in one of our Bangalore offices for a few hours before developing any symptoms. The employee has been on quarantine since then and we have asked colleagues who were in close contact with the employee to quarantine themselves and monitor their health," a Google India statement said.
Like other countries, the virus outbreak has brought India to a standstill, with most industries and corporate houses bracing for losses worth billions of dollars. To stop the virus from spreading further, the companies, as part of precautionary measures, are encouraging employees to work from home. The biggest such examples are e-commerce giant Amazon Inc and Twitter Inc.
Two days back, a Mindtree employee in Bangalore was tested positive for coronavirus. The software major's employee had recently returned from an overseas trip. Rao said the employee, who is a software engineer had, was exercising caution and had isolated himself on return from the foreign trip. Mindtree has sent out a series of advisories on safety measures at workplaces to its employees across the country as well as overseas. Other tech companies like Wipro and Tech Mahindra are also adopting work-from-home models.
The country on Thursday reported the first death of a 76-year-old man from Kalburgi, Karnataka. He died on his way from Hyderabad to Karnataka, and doctors were treating him for symptoms like breathlessness, cold and cough. With this, the number of infected persons in India has touched 79, including one death. COVID-19 has so far claimed 4,600 lives while more than 126,000 people have been infected globally.