After being criticized for lack of transparency, Amazon said Thursday that 19,816 of its 1,372 million U.S. front-line employees have tested positive for covid-19 or are presumed to have had the virus.

Some lawmakers and employees have been complaining since the outbreak began that the world’s largest online retailer was too secretive about cases at its warehouses and subsidiary Whole Foods Market, Bloomberg reported.

“This is a huge number for a company that has been downplaying how many of their employees have gotten sick,” said Deborah Berkowitz, a former chief of staff of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

In a blog post Thursday, Amazon said that it had compared its employees’ positive or presumed-positive test rates to that of the general population and concluded that Amazon’s were 42 percent lower.

“If the rate among Amazon and Whole Foods Market employees were the same as it is for the general population rate, we estimate that we would have seen 33,952 cases among our workforce. In reality, 19,816 employees have tested positive or been presumed positive,” Amazon said.

The e-commerce giant congratulated itself, saying it has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in testing, cleaning and other protective measures, and that they are working.

“Since the beginning of this crisis, we’ve worked hard to keep our employees informed, notifying them of every new case in their building,” Amazon said.

Not everyone agreed that Amazon had been transparent. 

Kenosha County Health Director Dr. Jen Freiheit described Amazon as “less than easy to work with” when trying to find out how many workers had tested positive for covid-19, NBC News reported.

When Kenosha, Wisconsin was under a tornado warning in August, employees say they were herded by the hundreds into windowless rooms in a fulfillment center — one of 110 in the U.S. — where they waited, shoulder-to-shoulder until the storm passed.

Amazon complained in the blog post that similar data has not been forthcoming from other major employers:

“Wide availability of data would allow us to benchmark our progress and share best practices across businesses and industries. Unfortunately, there are no standards for reporting or sharing this data, and there’s very little comparable information about infection rates and quarantine rates available from other companies.”

Walmart, with about 1.5 million U.S. employees, has not give specific numbers on covid rates but said it believes its “associates’ rate of infection tracks, or is below, the current rate of infection of the general public nationwide,” Bloomberg reported.

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Amazon scrambled to impose social distancing in the early days of the outbreak at its hundreds of warehouses, which stayed open during state-mandated closures. Workers were considered essential. However, the company repeatedly refused to disclose sickness rates. A top logistics executive said it was “not a particularly useful number.”

In March, 31-year-old Chris Smalls, a management assistant at Amazon, was fired after he organized a walkout over the lack of protection against covid-19 at a facility in Staten Island, New York.

Some employees felt Amazon hid the severity of outbreaks. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey led a coalition in May asking Amazon to go public with data on infections among its workers and employees of Whole Foods.

NBC News interviewed 40 Amazon employees from 23 facilities who said that many of the safety measures Amazon started at the beginning of the pandemic are no longer active or difficult to enforce.