Having toured multiple car plants, and knowing Tesla is more automated than many, I am of the belief that much of the line work can successfully happen at social distances.
1) Elon Musk has made many comments downplaying COVID19, and
2) In photos (even in their Tesla Return-to-Work Playbook), the Leadership Team doesn't wear face masks (only the low-level workers do).
The second issue is big. (1) They're clearly taking risks themselves (no PPE would be okay for a selfie, but these are clearly professional photoshoots with an AV team). (2) If leadership doesn't role-model safe behavior, you can't expect everyone else to follow.
In abstract, I agree Tesla should be the poster child for safely re-opening. In practice, if Laurie Shelby, their VP for health and safety, can't be bothered to even wear a cloth face mask to a photoshoot on how to reopen safely (I can't make this stuff up), I have serious reservations about Tesla having the in-house expertise to run a COVID-safe shop.
There's also the possibility of blowback. If Tesla re-opens without proper precautions -- and there's every indication they'll do that -- and those improper precautions turn out to be insufficient, that will make it that much harder for everyone else to reopen.
90% of safety is in attitudes, in being careful, and in being detail-oriented. The exact same high-level precautions can be 100% safe if executed well, and 0% safe is executed for PR or CYA. It seems Tesla is doing the latter (which is ironic, given their attention to detail everywhere else).
2). Is there really a need to over-analyze a photo shoot like that? High ranking officials usually don't wear masks (See Trump or Trudeau when they are talking to the press).
If it's about total number of deaths - we know that know and even if the number is lower, it means the lockdown worked, no?
If it's, for example, new information becoming available about covid virality, that will be irrelevant, as people have to make decisions now with the information available now.
Re 2) it's expected and important for leadership to set the tone. Arguably what Trump and Trudeau are doing (if what you say is true) is wrong.
If that plant has a record, it is one ignoring safety.
> A review by Forbes found 24 investigations by California Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors from 2014 to 2018, resulting in fines for 54 violations. These include new penalties that haven't yet hit the national online OSHA database, and they nearly double Tesla's fines over the last five years, to $236,730.
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/03/01/tesla-sa...
A plant with the degree of _change_ that Tesla has on its product line would likely have a very very dynamic production floor - resulting in more violations.
It also seems that the OSHA rules were not designed for Tesla's unique processes, so many of those violations, if you actually read them, are not relevant to Tesla and have nothing to do with safety.
This problem will go away as their plant process matures and as they are given the opportunity to comment on the next revision of the OSHA automotive plant rules.
Also, there have been no deaths or serious injuries, so it's hard to argue that safety was actually compromised here.
Also, why should OSHA redesign it's rules to fit Tesla's "unique" processes?
And to your last point about injuries: 1. Why should a death or serious injury be the indicator? 2. You're wrong about serious injuries, as a cursory search would show:
https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-says-its-factory-is...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/12/tesla-gigafactory-safety-pro...
One way would be if increased production floor changes increased OSHA inspections. More inspections yields more discovered violations even for a constant background amount of actual violations.
Safety was compromised due to the Heinrich/Bird safety pyramid, or accident triangle:
> It shows a relationship between serious accidents, minor accidents and near misses and proposes that if the number of minor accidents is reduced then there will be a corresponding fall in the number of serious accidents. […]
> The theory was developed further by Frank E Bird in 1966 based on the analysis of 1.7 million accident reports from almost 300 companies. He produced an amended triangle that showed a relationship of one serious injury accident to 10 minor injury (first aid only) accidents, to 30 damage causing accidents, to 600 near misses.[3] […] The numbers used by Bird were confirmed by a 1974 study by A. D. Swain, entitled The Human Element in Systems Safety.[3] The theory was later expanded upon by Bird and Germain in 1985's Practical Loss Control Leadership.[1]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_triangle
The more minor things happening, the greater the probability of a major incident happening, leading to greater chances of a death down the road.
The whole point in going hard on the small things is to help reduces the odds of things escalating because it's easy to get sloppy in one's thinking over time, and you can get 'risk creep'.
* https://risk-engineering.org/concept/Heinrich-Bird-accident-...
I'm not familiar with Tesla assembly lines, but my understanding is that they are highly automated with complex robotics. This would be a typical example of a system where many safety risks are systemic and more strongly dependent on design errors than on worker safety behaviours, which is exactly the type of system in which the structuralist interpretation of the Heinrich-Bird pyramid ("reduce the small stuff at the base of the pyramid and the stuff up the top will drop down and disappear") is really inappropriate, as it can reduce attention paid to safety at a system design level.
https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-t...