Fourteen new cases of the coronavirus were confirmed at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state over the weekend, putting the site’s cumulative case count at more than 500 since the pandemic hit the U.S. in January.
Eight workers at the former plutonium production facility informed management Friday they had tested positive for COVID-19. On Saturday four more reported they have the virus, followed by two more on Sunday, according to updates posted on a DOE emergency operations website at Hanford run by a contractor.
The 14 latest cases are in addition to the 489 already confirmed by a DOE Office of Environmental Management spokesperson on Thursday. The 16 nuclear cleanup sites overseen by Environmental Management have recorded 2,009 cases in 2020 as of last week.
As of Monday morning, the United States has confirmed roughly 16.2 million cases of COVID-19 and 299,000 deaths, according to an online tracker run by Johns Hopkins University.
