Top Glove, the world’s largest manufacturer of rubber gloves, says that one of its employees died on the 12th of This month after contracting COVID-19. This was the first case of mass infection in the company’s dormitories and factories.
Top Glove told Reuters by email that the deceased was a 29-year-old worker from Nepal who had worked for more than two years at the factory in Klang, about 40 kilometres west of the capital Kuala Lumpur.
After the outbreak of the epidemic, countries all over the world hurriedly stockpiled protective equipment. As a result, orders for Top Glove increased significantly.
Top Glove owned 47 factories, 41 of which were in Malaysia. Many of Top Glove’s low-paid employees were from Nepal and lived in cramped dormitories.
More than 5,000 people tested positive at the Top Glove facility, the largest cluster infection in Malaysia. The company said the first confirmed cases were detected only after mandatory screening tests were carried out by employees before flying home on Nov. 2.
Factory employees told Reuters it was difficult to maintain a social distance in the workplace and enforcement was lax. Dormitory conditions are also not ideal, often a room packed 20 people.
In Malaysia, there have been 83,475 confirmed cases and 415 deaths, according to tracking data from Johns Hopkins University.
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