Apple closes multiple retail stores across U.S. and Canada over COVID fears

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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