The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management currently has 48 active confirmed cases of COVID-19, which is five less than a week ago, a spokesperson for the cleanup office said in a Thursday email.
The number of weekly confirmed cases in the cleanup complex stayed within a tight range of 47 to 53 for the month of June, according to data provided by Environmental Management (EM).
That is a big improvement from late January when the number of cases exceeded 400 among federal and contractor employees at EM workplaces. There were more than 100 active cases as recently as late May.
While DOE says it does not track vaccination rates at the 16 nuclear sites overseen by EM, sources around the complex say the number of vaccinated workers has risen steadily.
Earlier this month, on June 11, the Hanford Site in Washington state formally dropped its mandate for indoor mask-wearing for fully vaccinated individuals, becoming probably the last big cleanup site to do so, sources said. HPMC Occupational Medical Services, the on-site employee health contractor at Hanford, is doing mobile onsite vaccination clinics at the former plutonium production complex.
The DOE and its contractors are not requiring workers to get vaccinated for COVID-19 although it is encouraging them to do so. The agency does provide several hours of paid leave to allow employees to get their shots. In mid-June, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant said, on its Facebook page, under a state program New Mexicans could receive $100 by getting vaccinated between June 14 and June 17. It was part of a state effort to meet a 60% vaccination goal.
President Joe Biden has set a goal of having 70% of all U.S. adults receive at least one shot of a coronavirus vaccine by July 4. A vaccination tracker site run by the Mayo Clinic indicates that as of June 20 nearly 60% of adults in their working years, age 18 through 64, have received at least one dose.
Since the pandemic began in the United States almost 33.6 million people have contracted the illness and 603,000 have died as a result, as of this morning according to coronavirus tracking site managed by Johns Hopkins University.
