Active COVID-19 cases at the National Nuclear Security Administration had spiked to a two-month high in July by Friday after reaching their lowest level of the year earlier in the same month, according to data provided by agency headquarters in Washington.
The agency, with its mission-essential nuclear-weapons work, was among the early beneficiaries of COVID-19 vaccines, though the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will not say how many of its employees and contractors are fully vaccinated against the disease.
On Friday, NNSA headquarters reported 115 active cases among employees of its labs, plants and sites, up from a low of 33 the week of July 9, which was the nadir for 2021. Friday’s count was the highest since the week ended May 21.
For a silver lining, the NNSA has not reported a COVID-19 fatality all year — there had been 16 across the enterprise during the pandemic, at deadline — and even after July’s surge, the complex is nowhere near the 1,000-plus active cases it had each week for about a month around December.
NNSA had racked up more than 4,000 cases enterprise-wide in April, when the agency stopped reporting its cumulative case count.
The big pandemic news this week was President Joe Biden’s order that any federal employee or on-site contract unwilling to “attest” that they have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 will have to wear masks on federal property, submit to mandatory COVID testing up to twice a week and face official travel restrictions, the White House announced Thursday.
That news followed a DOE bulletin Wednesday alerting employees that everyone would again have to wear masks indoors at agency buildings, regardless of vaccination status.
Meanwhile, out at the NNSA national laboratories, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California picked up a cumulative 13 COVID-19 cases in July.
Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico added a cumulative 14 in the first four weeks of the month. That includes people at its California campus near Livermore. The lab said Thursday that 13,580 employees had received a COVID-19 vaccination as of July 23. Sandia’s public COVID-19 reporting lags behind one week.
Los Alamos stopped publicly reporting COVID-19 metrics of any kind in mid-June. Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor inquires weekly and has for most of the ongoing pandemic. A spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment.
At the Nevada National Security Site, more than 2,000 people had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and more than 1,900 had received two doses, a spokesperson said this week. Those numbers are essentially flat with the rest of July.
At the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas and the Y-12 National Security Site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., vaccinations rose slightly in July, to about 1,900 fully vaccinated at Pantex, or 50 more than at the beginning of the month, and about 4,100 fully vaccinated at Y-12, about 100 more than the week ended July 2.
Other NNSA sites did not reply to requests for comment.
