Fox News Media Employees With Coronavirus Climbs To Four

Fox News Media announced Saturday that a total of four employees have now tested positive for coronavirus.

“We just learned in the last 90 minutes that two additional FOX News Media employees have tested positive for COVID-19,” Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott and Fox President Jay Wallace said in a memo obtained by Deadline Saturday evening Eastern Time. “The total number of employees now affected stands at four, all based in our New York offices.”

Of the two latest confirmed cases, one employee works on the 15th floor of the company’s NYC headquarters and was last in the building on Friday, March 6. The other employee also works on the 15th floor and was last in the building on Monday, March 16.

The memo came just hours after the company said this afternoon that a second Fox Business staffer had tested positive for the coronavirus, after the employee alerted the company today about the positive test result. The individual last worked on Monday, March 16, on the building’s 12th floor.

Meanwhile on Friday, the company said it was aware of the first confirmed coronavirus infection of an employee at the Fox corporation. That person works on the 20th floor of the Fox offices.

In response to the pandemic, Scott and Wallace announced measures last week to reduce the number of in-office employees during the crisis, as well as to limit in-studio guests. They also said that there would be production and programming changes, and shows featuring Trish Regan and Kennedy were put on hiatus. Fox additionally discouraged all non-essential and non-emergency travel, and launched a website, coronavirusnow.com, with the latest news about the virus.

Fox Business has said it is scaling back two hours from its schedule, stopping production of FBN am at 5 a.m. ET and Bulls & Bears at 5 p.m. ET. Lou Dobbs Tonight will air at 5 p.m., and a repeat of his show will run at 7 p.m. ET.

Staffers at other news organization, including CNN, NBC News, CBS News and ABC News,  have tested positive for coronavirus.

On Friday, NBC said longtime employee Larry Edgeworth, 61, had died after testing positive for the virus. Edgeworth spent 25 years at NBC News as an audio technician, and worked in an equipment room at the network’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza headquarters in New York.