There are currently 391 active COVID-19 cases within the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup complex, a spokesperson for the Office of Environmental Management said via email Thursday.
The latest figure represents a decrease from the 423 active cases confirmed by Environmental Management (EM) the prior week as well as the 473 from two weeks ago.
As of Friday morning, there are 190 Savannah River Site employees currently quarantined with COVID-19, a spokesperson for the South Carolina-based site said via email. That is down from the 205 workers quarantined a week earlier and the 222 the prior week.
Michael Budney, EM’s top manager at the site, told the Savannah River Site’s Citizens Advisory Board earlier this week that quarantined employees either have a positive test or have been in contact with someone who has.
The vast majority of positive cases result from exposures away from the jobsite, Budney said. The Savannah River position is that employees are “safer at work” than nearly anyplace else, he added, striking a familiar DOE refrain.
Budney said Savannah River managers are looking at the new Biden administration guidance on COVID-19 safety at federal properties to see if it will require additional precautions. “It is a serious illness … we have had some folks pass away from this,” Budney told the advisory board.
Meanwhile, 19 new positive active cases were confirmed by managers at DOE’s Hanford Site in Washington state over the past week — 13 on Monday and six on Sunday.
The recent case at Hanford brings the total there to roughly 640 cases, based on public statements by DOE’s site manager Brian Vance and updates to a DOE operations website for the former plutonium production facility.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., had 14 more employees test positive for COVID-19 between Jan. 13 and Jan. 19, the prime contractor said in a Jan. 24 Twitter post. Eleven of the 14 at WIPP work directly for prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership, while the other three work for subcontractors, according to the social media notice.
To date, WIPP management has learned of 237 positive confirmed cases since the coronavirus took hold in the United States in early 2020, according to the prime. Of those, 209 have recovered in accordance with protocols issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to the Jan. 23 post. No new weekly figures were available from WIPP as of deadline Friday.
Separately, an industry source said by phone Thursday that large segments of the workforce at various EM sites say they are reluctant to take the COVID-19 vaccine when they become eligible to receive it.
“We have not conducted formal surveys,” said the EM spokesperson of worker willingness. “We encourage our employees to receive the vaccination as it is available and we continue to emphasize taking the necessary COVID-19 precautions.”
COVID-19 continues to take a heavy toll nationally and worldwide. As of Friday morning there were more than 25.7 million total cases of COVID-19 in the United States and 433,000 deaths as a result since the pandemic began, according to an online tracker run by Johns Hopkins University.
