Apple Park drone footage shows ghost town amid COVID-19 outbreak

Apple Park appears all but abandoned due to government lockdown orders and Apple work-from-home policies.

In early March, Apple began to encourage employees to work from home whenever possible in an effort to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Since then, government shelter-in-place orders — both at the local and state levels — appear to have essentially shut down Apple Park.

Footage shot by drone pilot Duncan Sinfield and posted to YouTube shows the visible and eerie effects of those mandates. The massive Apple Park campus appears abandoned as all non-essential employees remain at home in the San Francisco Bay Area.

It's likely that there are still employees on the premises, however, since California's statewide stay-at-home order exempts people in critical roles such as database administrators or IT personnel.

The video also clearly shows off the Jony Ive-designed, rainbow-colored stage that was constructed to be part of Apple Park's formal opening event in May 2019.

Aside from this most recent video, Sinfield has a large library of Apple Park drone flyovers on his YouTube channel, including many clips tracking Apple Park's construction that depict the campus as similarly empty.