To date 21 individuals employed at Department of Energy nuclear cleanup worksites have died as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, a federal spokesperson said this week.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM) spokesperson provided the fatality figure Thursday in response to an inquiry from Weapons Complex Monitor.
Since the United States started tracking data on the pandemic in early 2020, roughly 4,600 members of the federal and contractor nuclear cleanup workforce have gotten COVID-19 through the first quarter of 2021, EM confirmed a few weeks ago.
On Thursday there were 132 confirmed active COVID cases in the EM complex, the spokesperson said. That is higher than the 101 recorded a week ago, and the highest weekly number in about four weeks.
Environmental Management lacks hard complex-wide numbers on the number of its workers vaccinated at the 16 nuclear cleanup sites, the spokesperson said.
The Hanford Site in Washington state, among other cleanup locations, has started offering vaccinations to willing employees. The vaccinations are tough to track, given that many employees receive their jabs off-site, according to EM.
At certain locations, like the Nevada National Security Site and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, vaccination efforts are led by the National Nuclear Security Administration. At the Idaho National Laboratory, the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy has been administering shots there, the EM spokesperson said.
As of Friday morning, there are 52 Savannah River Site employees in South Carolina currently quarantined with COVID-19, according to a contractor-run website for the DOE facility. That represents an increase from last week’s figure of 36.
As of Thursday, more than 40% of the United States population of roughly 331 million people have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As of midday Friday, the United States has confirmed more than 32.3 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 575,000 deaths, according to an online tracker curated by Johns Hopkins University.
