There were 99 confirmed active cases of COVID-19 in the Department of Energy nuclear cleanup complex during the past week, a spokesperson with the office of Environmental Management said via Thursday email.
That is 16 less than the prior week. It is also much less than late September when the Environmental Management (EM) weekly case count was running upwards of 250.
Amid the complex-wide downturn, eleven employees at DIE’s Hanford Site in Washington state this week informed their bosses they have tested positive for COVID-19, according to an online advisory posted Monday.
The Leidos-led contractor, Hanford Mission Integration Solutions, which acts as a landlord or city manager for the former plutonium production complex, posted the development Monday evening on a website that includes various employee advisories, including emergency incidents and road closings. Most new COVID reports cited on the website in recent weeks have tended to involve only one or two new cases.
As of last week, there had been more than 7,100 cases of COVID-19 across the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management’s worksites, an EM spokesperson said last week.
Under executive orders in September by President Joe Biden, all federal contractors must be vaccinated against COVID-19 by early December or face termination unless they receive some type of medical or religious exemption. Legal challenges linked to implementation of vaccine mandates have been filed or at least announced for the Hanford Site, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
