Apple is further delaying its return to bodily workplace work from October till January amid rising uncertainties about what surging Covid-19 instances will imply for its workforce.

In a Thursday memo, Deirdre O’Brien, Apple’s human sources and retail head, informed workers that the Delta variant’s march throughout the U.S. had induced the corporate to additional delay its company reopening to no less than early 2022, however mentioned that the corporate doesn’t at present count on to shutter its retail stores, which started reopening in May 2020. The memo additionally strongly inspired staffers to get vaccinated, though Apple doesn’t at present mandate that its workers be inoculated towards the virus, as some tech corporations have not too long ago achieved.

Apple—which simply final month pushed its preliminary deliberate return to the workplace from September to October—signaled early on that it deliberate to be bullish on returning to bodily workplace work, regardless of Silicon Valley’s usually cautious angle about reopening its sprawling tech campuses. But as one more rise in Covid-19 instances all through the U.S. threatens to plunge the nation into uncertainty as soon as once more, the tech big has seemingly retooled its method in an effort to prioritize employees’ security.

Unlike rivals like Facebook, which has given workers the choice to proceed working remotely or decide to working within the workplace round 50% of the time, and Google, which has embraced distant work indefinitely and signaled that it’ll undertake a hybrid work mannequin going ahead, Apple tried to shift issues again to full-time workplace work as early as spring 2021. Initially, the corporate mentioned that it deliberate to have most of its employees return to its places of work no less than three days every week starting in September, however grew to become one of many first massive tech corporations to desert these plans as new studies emerged in regards to the extremely contagious Delta variant emerged.

In-person work isn’t the one coverage Apple has retooled in gentle of its Covid-19 considerations; as Bloomberg studies, the corporate reinstated its in-store masks mandate in July after revoking it in June, and likewise modified plans to reinstate in-store courses lower than at some point after they had been first introduced.