An employee at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee died this week from COVID-19, as confirmed cases of the disease across the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) complex again shot up by double digits.
The Y-12 worker “reportedly contracted the virus from a contact outside of work,” an agency spokesperson wrote Friday in an email. The spokesperson would not identify the worker, or say what sort of work the employee did at the nation’s manufacturing hub for nuclear-weapon secondary stages.
Across the NNSA’s network of sites, production plants and labs, there were 26 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed as of Friday, compared with last week. That makes for a total of 95 active cases across the enterprise, and a total of 191 recorded at weapons sites since the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus 2019 hit the U.S. in January.
This is the second straight week that the NNSA has confirmed more than 20 new COVID-19 cases. Case numbers are soaring nationwide, as businesses remain mostly open and people in many states carry on with many of their usual summer routines and gatherings.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M., each now have 30 confirmed cases, spokespersons said Friday. That’s an increase of 10 week to week for Livermore, and an increase of 15 over the past two weeks for Los Alamos.
The Sandia National Laboratories had 26 cases, with 21 in Albuquerque, N.M., and five in the Livermore, Calif., satellite campus, a lab spokesperson said Friday. That’s up from 24 cases confirmed in the lab network last week: 20 in Albuquerque and four in Livermore.
At all of the weapons labs, more than half the workforce is working from home.
All three of the NNSA’s main weapons production sites, the Kansas City National Security Campus in Missouri, the Pantex Plant weapons service center in Amarillo, Texas, and Y-12, remained at normal operations with maximum telework: a term used by NNSA headquarters to signal that both weapons workers and support-services personnel are allowed on site — but that anyone who is able to telework should be allowed to do so.
The agency has not said how the response to COVID-19, which includes two-week quarantines for anyone who tests positive, displays symptoms, or might have come into contact with someone who was sick, has affected productivity. The agency has completed some minor alterations and scheduled weapon servicing during the pandemic response, but larger milestones loom in 2021 and 2022, when the NNSA is scheduled to finish the first production units of the W88 Alt-370 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead and B61-12 gravity bomb, respectively.
Y-12 this week said it ceased making B61-12 canned subassemblies — secondary stages — for several weeks in April and May, when the site partially idled in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19. The facility said the program overall is still on schedule.
Meanwhile, with COVID-19 cases on the rise nationwide and Washington, D.C.-area school systems wondering whether they’ll reopen for in-person classes in the fall, the Department of Energy will no longer require most employees to return to their offices in the next phase of the agency’s reopening plan.
Most of DOE’s 7,000 federal employees in the region, which includes about 1,000 National Nuclear Security Administration personnel, have been working remotely since March, when states and localities issued widespread stay-at-home orders in an effort to slow the spread of the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus 2019.
Now, according to a memo from Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette, “it is unlikely that local conditions in the [Washington area] will support a fully ‘back to normal’ Phase 3 return to the workplace as originally envisioned in the HQ Plan.”
Instead, people who are especially vulnerable to COVID-19, as well as those with children or other dependents to care for, will be allowed to request permission to continue telework whenever the Energy Department does move on from Phase 2 of its reopening plan. During that phase, some 1,400 people returned to the agency’s Forrestal Building in downtown Washington and the Germantown building in nearby suburban Maryland.
Cases in NNSA Host Regions
Following is Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor’s weekly digest of confirmed COVID-19 cases, including fatal cases, in the host cities and counties of NNSA nuclear weapons sites.
The figures below are the cumulative cases recorded since the first confirmed U.S. instance of COVID-19 in January.
Data come from a tracker maintained by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and from select states, counties, and cities, where noted.
The Monitor tracks weekly changes, using the latest data available at deadline, which is sometimes current as of the Thursday before publication.
Testing figures report the number of aggregate tests, not the number of people tested.
Kansas City, Mo. – Kansas City National Security Campus
The city so far has a total of 2,957 total confirmed cases and 31 deaths, up from 2,184 confirmed cases last week, with no new deaths. The city recorded nearly 500 more new confirmed cases this week than it recorded last week, when it recorded some 150 more confirmed cases than in the prior week.
The statewide case count jumped again this week, with Missouri registering around 31,000 confirmed cases and 1,123 total deaths, up from some 26,400 confirmed cases and 1,075 deaths a week ago. There were more than 4,500 new cases reported this week in the state than there were last week. Missouri also had a big spike of new cases in June.
Almost 530,000 tests had been performed statewide, at deadline Friday, up from 454,000 a week ago and 390,000 the week before that.
Missouri was among the first states to reopen businesses that shuttered for months to slow the spread of COVID-19, and to relax restrictions on the size of gatherings.
New Mexico – NNSA Albuquerque, Albuquerque; Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque; Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos
New Mexico had some 16,150 confirmed total cases and 562 deaths at deadline, up sharply from 14,250 cases and 533 total deaths a week ago. That’s about 1,900 more new cases this week than last week.
Bernalillo County, near Albuquerque and Sandia, had about 3,500 confirmed positive cases and 99 deaths at deadline, up from 2,800 cases and 94 deaths last week. There were around 230 more new cases confirmed this week than last week, a slight increase in the rate of growth for the county.
About 437,00 tests had been performed in New Mexico, rising from about 390,000 a week ago and 344,000 the week before that, according to the state and the Johns Hopkins tracker.
Los Alamos County had 14 confirmed cases, up one from 11 cases last week. From late April to early June, Los Alamos had held steady at six cases.
Cases in some of the counties surrounding Los Alamos rose again, with some 75 more new cases recorded this week than last week.
Sandoval County had 883 confirmed cases and 31 deaths at deadline, up from 802 confirmed cases and 30 deaths a week ago. Sandoval has a worse outbreak than any other county near Los Alamos, but the spread slowed starting in June.
Taos County this week had 65 confirmed cases and one death. That is up from 51 cases last week, with one death still. Rio Arriba had 156 cases and one death, up from 128 cases last week, but with no new deaths. Santa Fe, N.M., south of Los Alamos, had 389 confirmed total cases, up from 302 confirmed a week ago. Santa Fe’s fatal cases held steady at three for a seventh consecutive week.
Oak Ridge, Tenn., Anderson County – Y-12 National Security Complex
There were at deadline 252 confirmed cases and two deaths in Anderson County, Tenn., which includes the Y-12 National Security Complex. That is up from 178 confirmed cases a week ago, with no new deaths. The increase in new cases this week was flat, compared with last week, at almost 75. Still, the case count in the Y-12 host county has skyrocketed since the end of June, when it had around 80 cases.
There were at deadline more than 71,500 confirmed total cases and 796 total deaths statewide, up from 57,600 cases and 710 deaths a week ago. There were about 5,000 more new confirmed cases this week than there were last week.
About 1.1 million tests had been performed in the state at deadline, up from 973,000 last week and 818,000 the week before, according to the state and the Johns Hopkins tracker.
Livermore, Calif., Alameda County – Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (including Sandia, Calif.)
In Alameda County, near the Livermore lab, there were as of this week more than 8,600 confirmed cases and 154 total deaths at deadline, up from about 7,400 confirmed cases and 146 deaths a week ago. The number of new cases this week was about 500 higher than the number of new cases last week. The county issued standing orders to shelter in place and wear masks in public in mid-June, and those orders remained active at deadline.
In neighboring San Jaoquin County, there were nearly 7,700 confirmed cases and 81 deaths, up from almost 6,600 cases and 77 deaths the week before. There were more than 550 new cases recorded this week than there were last week in the county.
California, the largest and most populous state in the union, had almost 365,000 confirmed cases and 7,491 total deaths at deadline, compared with about 300,000 confirmed cases and 6,859 total deaths a week ago. That was 15,000 more new confirmed cases for California this week than last week. This week, California was within 35,000 cumulative cases behind New York, the early epicenter of the U.S. outbreak. Last week, the gap was about 100,000.
There have been almost 6 million total tests performed in California, up from about 5 million last week and 4.2 million the week before that.
Aiken, S.C., Aiken County – Savannah River Site
Cases at the Savannah River Site soared this week, when Aiken had 227 more confirmed new cases this week than it did the week before. Cases continue to rise rapidly in South Carolina.
Aiken had 903 confirmed cases at deadline Friday, with 13 deaths. That’s up from about 575 cases and 11 deaths a week ago.
Cases soared at the Savannah River Site, compared with previous weeks. The site had confirmed 131 total cases of COVID-19 by deadline, up from a total of 87 a week ago. At deadline Friday, 66 site personnel who previously tested positive had recovered. There were 44 new cases recorded this week, 19 more new cases than last week. One person had died from COVID-19 at the site, at deadline: an employee of site operations contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions.
Statewide, South Carolina endured another big increase in verified infections this week, with about 64,100 confirmed cases and 1,070 total confirmed deaths. That is up from about 50,690 confirmed cases and 905 deaths last week. The number of new cases confirmed this week was over 6,000 higher than the number of new cases reported the week before. That’s the state’s biggest week-to-week spike in new-case growth to date. On July 3, there were over 1,400 more new cases in South Carolina than the week before that, and that was a record for the state, up until this week.
There had been nearly 540,000 tests performed in South Carolina as of deadline, up from about 463,000 a week ago and 390,000 the week before that.
Amarillo, Texas, including Potter and Randall counties – Pantex Plant
July has been brutal in Texas, so far. For most of the past seven days, the state notched about 10,000 new cases a day. As with last week, the Pantex host counties have not seen the same rapid, post-Memorial Day increases as some other Texas municipalities — nor a repeat of the early May spike the locales registered when the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came to town to perform tests at meatpacking plants in the Amarillo region.
The Amarillo-area counties had a combined total of 4,327 cases and 46 deaths at deadline: 3,119 cases and still 39 deaths in Potter; 1,208 cases and still seven deaths in Randall, according to the Amarillo Public Health Department.
Last week at this time, the counties had a combined 4,064 cases and still 46 deaths: 3,038 cases and 39 deaths for Potter, and 981 cases and seven deaths in Randall. COVID-19 fatalities in the counties had been flat for two weeks, at deadline.
The number of combined new cases this week was more than 50 higher than last week, when the counties confirmed 30 more cases than the week before that.
The two counties had at deadline combined for 27,802 tests performed, up from 26,661 last week and 24,802 the week before that, according to the Amarillo health department.
The Pantex Plant, although within a stone’s throw of the Potter County line, is a federal property surrounded on three sides by the sparsely populated Carson County, which itself had reported 10 confirmed cases of COVID-19, at deadline. That’s flat week to week.
Texas-wide, there were almost 306,000 total confirmed cases and 3,705 total deaths, up dramatically from more than 236,500 cases and 3,006 total deaths last week. The number of new confirmed cases in Texas this week was about 19,000 higher than the number of new cases recorded the week before.
There had been about 2.7 million tests processed in Texas at deadline, up from 2.3 million last week, and 1.9 million the week before that, according to the state and the Hopkins tracker.
Nevada – Nevada National Security Site
There were 212 confirmed cases in Nye County, Nev., near the northwestern perimeter of the former Nevada Test Site, up 31 from 181. Nye County has had three two fatal cases of COVID-19 at deadline: flat, over the past two weeks. The remote county’s count of confirmed cases more than doubled inside a month.
In Las Vegas and surrounding Clark County, which have most of the state’s cases and deaths, there were more than 26,900 cases and 507 deaths, up from around 20,600 cases and 468 total deaths last week. That’s about 1,275 more new cases this week than there were the week before, according to the Hopkins tracker.
Statewide, Nevada had about 31,900 cases and 626 deaths, up from some 24,900 cases and 571 total deaths a week ago. The number of new cases recorded this week was about 2,800 higher than the number of new cases recorded the week before, another big growth week after a dip last week that followed a post-July 4 surge.
There had been almost 371,000 tests performed in Nevada, as of deadline, up from about 329,800 a week ago and 284,000 tests a week before that, according to the state and the Johns Hopkins tracker.
Nationwide
There were at deadline 138,543 confirmed fatal cases of COVID-19 domestically, up from 133,291 confirmed deaths last week, according to the Hopkins tracker.
The United States remains by far the most infected nation on Earth, with more than 3.6 million cases, up some 500,000 confirmed cases from a week ago. The number of new cases nationally was about 100,000 greater in the week now ended than in the prior week.
Since confirmation that the outbreak had hit the U.S., about 1 million people domestically had recovered from their bouts with COVID-19, making for about 31,000 recoveries, week-to-week. There had been more than 43 million tests performed in the U.S., up from 38 million a week ago, and up from 33 million the week before that.
