In a company of ten thousand employees, I have no problem giving benefit of the doubt that two instances of wrongful termination could be done by mistake. It's not unreasonable to imagine that an HR department might screw up at least 0.02% of the time when having to manage ten thousand individuals making ten thousand individual decisions with regards to their response to a pandemic.

Besides, it just doesn't ring true to me. Had this been intentional, they would have been far more careful and not set themselves up for the most predictable made-for-media firing scandal you could possibly envisage. Companies deal with firings all the time, they know to avoid this sort of thing. That's basically the point of an HR department.