The number of active cases of COVID-19 within the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup complex dropped by about 50 this week but remained above 400.
There are currently 423 active cases at properties run by the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM), a spokesperson for the cleanup branch said in a Thursday email.
That marks a decline from 473 the prior week, but an increase from the 381 reported two weeks ago.
Savannah River closed out 2020 with roughly 1,100 total confirmed positive cases of COVID-19, according to a late December staff report filed with the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. The document indicates that between Nov. 30 and Dec. 23, the number of positive cases at SRS increased from 782 to 1,076.
Management at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state has confirmed 27 new cases of COVID-19 in the past week.
Bosses at the former plutonium production facility were informed of the latest batch of positive cases, 10, on Thursday, according to an advisory posted on a DOE website run by the site services contractor.
The latest infections at Hanford mean there have now been roughly 620 confirmed positive cases there since the pandemic started spreading domestically roughly a year ago.
During 2020, EM recorded more than 2,600 cases of the coronavirus at its nuclear cleanup site. After going to minimal operations for two months, ending in June of last year, the DOE has brought many of its employees back onsite, but has been unable to resume pre-pandemic operations at any site, the EM spokesperson confirmed.
As of Thursday evening, there have been more than 24.6 million cases of the virus in the United States and about 410,000 deaths resulting from it, according to an online tracker run by Johns Hopkins University.
