Goldman Sachs asked Staff to Work from Home as COVID-19 cases rise
Investment banking company Goldman Sachs has asked its staff in Bengaluru to return working from home in the wake of rising Coronavirus infection in the city.
This is reversing moves as earlier the company asked its employees to get back to offices.
Commenting on India’s office move, a spokesman for the bank in New York said, “We continue to work on plans to return our people to the office safely, and those plans will vary division by division, country by country, city by city.
“There’s no word on how long the work-from-home will continue but my guess is that we won’t be returning to the office for the next three to four months.” the spokesman said.
Goldman Sachs employs about 7,000 staff, involved in various functions including technology, finance, and human resources, trading, and consumer banking business in the Bengaluru office.
India earlier reported a new variant of the coronavirus as new infections and deaths nationwide hit the highest this year, prompting the imposition of new restrictions in some states.
According to the NDTV report, Bengaluru noted 1,280 new infections on Tuesday, according to city data, and several sources at Goldman said that teams had been told to return to working from home ahead of an all-office townhall call at 2 pm local time on Thursday.
In March so far, nearly 14,000 new cases have been reported, more than twice the number recorded in February.
India has detected a new “double mutant” COVID-19 variant in states like Maharashtra and Delhi as it recorded the highest ever one-day spike in cases and deaths from the disease this year with the Centre on Wednesday saying the surge in Maharashtra and Punjab is of “grave concern”.
The Union Health Ministry said the new “double mutant” variant of SARS-CoV-2 was detected in Delhi, Maharashtra, and some other places in addition to the three “variants of concern” — first noticed in the UK, South Africa, and Brazil — that have been found in at least 18 states and union territories.
