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KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia’s Top Glove reported that a worker died on Saturday from COVID-19, the first death since the outbreak in their dormitories and factories in October.
The manufacturer told Reuters in an email that the 29-year-old from Nepal had worked at its manufacturing plant in Klang, 40 km west of the capital Kuala Lumpur, for more than two years.
Top Glove’s factory and dormitory complex in Klang has become Malaysia’s largest coronavirus cluster with more than 5,000 infections, about 94 percent of them foreign, the country’s Health Ministry said in a statement on 1 May. December.
On December 9, Top Glove said that a total of 5,147 workers at its Klang factories tested positive for COVID-19.
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Top Glove, the world’s largest glove manufacturer, makes a quarter of the world’s medical rubber gloves, up to about 250 million per day.
It operates 47 plants in total, 41 in Malaysia and the rest in Thailand, China and Vietnam. Thirty-six of them produce gloves. It has around 16,000 factory employees, just over half of them in factories in Klang.
The Malaysian government ordered Top Glove on November 23 to begin closing its factories in stages, so that workers could be screened.
The country’s labor department said earlier this month it would press charges against Top Glove for housing its workers, which it deemed cramped and stuffy.
On December 7, Top Glove told Reuters in a statement that it introduced temperature controls and more regular sanitation of factories, offices, transport vehicles and dormitories at the start of the pandemic, and that it is in the process of improving the accommodation of its workers.
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