Amazon’s Covid-19 response has been criticized more than Chinese rivals Alibaba and JD.com

The coronavirus pandemic has put a huge burden on e-commerce giants around the world but some appear to have dealt with it better than others.

Amazon has had Covid-19 related deaths, protests, and law suits. Its closest equivalents in China, Alibaba and JD.com, have had none of those.

While these sprawling e-commerce giants are all very different, they’ve all had to respond to the same virus.

China’s e-commerce giants rushed in safety measures, but Amazon has been accused of having a slower response with some dubbing its warehouses as “breeding grounds of coronavirus.”

Both Alibaba and JD.com told CNBC they have recorded zero warehouse worker deaths as a result of the virus, whereas Amazon has had at least eight.

Jeff Bezos’s Seattle-headquartered company has created a Covid-19 blogwhere it posts daily updates on how it is responding to the crisis. It’s a lengthy read, suggesting Amazon is taking plenty of steps to protect workers, customers, and the business itself.

But questions are still being asked and far fewer are being asked about Alibaba and JD.com’s response. However, that’s not to say everything is perfect. It’s harder to get a true picture of what’s happening behind the scenes of Chinese tech companies as Chinese workers rarely speak out against their employers and Chinese firms aren’t scrutinized by the media as much as their Western counterparts.

Over 50 Amazon “fulfilment centers” around the world have seen cases of the coronavirus.

In March, a dozen Amazon warehouse workers told CNBC that they were terrified to go to work. “The workplace is overcrowded,” said Hibaq Mohamed, a warehouse worker who works out of MSP1 in Minnesota. “I am afraid, but I cannot stop working without pay.”

The situation got so bad in France that a French court ordered Amazon to shut down six warehouses across the country on April 6 to protect workers and the facilities weren’t allowed to reopen until mid-May.

Amazon warehouse workers in the U.S. and Europe voiced their concerns in public protects, which Amazon clamped down hard on by firing workers.

Last month, Amazon VP Tim Bray quit “in dismay” at the firm’s crackdown. In a blog post, the Amazon Web Services engineer said the firing of protestors was evidence of “a vein of toxicity running through the company culture.”

Amazon says it has gone to “great lengths” to protect workers from the coronavirus. Temperature checks, disinfectant spraying, “enhanced” cleaning and social distancing have been introduced at warehouses, and workers are given protective masks to wear.

But some of these measures took weeks to implement and many of them were in place at Alibaba and JD.com soon after they learned of the virus.