Apple, Google, and others asked to avoid travel and cancel big events

Companies based in Santa Clara County, California — which includes Cupertino, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and San Jose — should avoid travel and postpone or cancel mass gatherings, the county recommended on Thursday. The recommendations come after six new cases of the novel coronavirus have been identified in the area, bringing the total number of people confirmed locally to have the disease to 20. The county’s guidance affects several major Silicon Valley employers. Apple, for instance, is headquartered in Cupertino; Google in Mountain View; Tesla, in Palo Alto; Netflix, in Los Gatos; LinkedIn, in Sunnyvale; Adobe, in San Jose; and Intel and Nvidia, in Santa Clara.

Other companies with offices in the area might be affected as well, such as Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft. Other guidance from the county includes minimizing the number of people “working within arm’s length of one another,” urging people to stay home if they’re sick, and spacing out start and end times of the workday for employees. People at higher risk for serious illness — those who are over 50 or have another underlying health condition — should stay home. The county recommendations are an attempt to slow the spread of the new coronavirus by limiting in-person contact.

Many of the tech companies based in the area — the “valley” in Silicon Valley referred originally to the Santa Clara Valley — have already made their own attempts to curb the disease’s spread. Here are the policies The Verge is aware of that are in place by Santa Clara County-based companies: Update March 6th, 3:12PM ET: Added additional precautions taken by Apple and Google.