The COVID-19 pandemic did not take a holiday during Christmas week, with new infections reported at Department of Energy nuclear cleanup operations such as the Hanford Site in Washington state and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
Supervisors at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) were notified of nine positive COVID-19 cases between Dec. 16 and Dec. 21, according to a Dec. 23 press release issued by the prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership. Seven of the nine new coronavirus cases were among employees of the prime contractor and the other two were subcontractor workers.
The nine new cases are two more than the seven reported at WIPP the prior week. The underground disposal site for transuranic waste recently shifted to minimal operations, taking two waste shipments per week through the remainder of 2020.
Through Dec. 21, WIPP has recorded 177 positive cases in 2020, with 161 of the individuals having recovered, according to the press release that was also posted on Twitter.
Meanwhile, on Dec. 27, four additional positive cases were reported at the Hanford Site, according to a contractor-maintained website for employee alerts at the former plutonium production complex. Altogether between Dec. 18 and Dec. 27, there were 15 new reported cases of COVID-19 at Hanford, bringing the 2020 total there to roughly 535.
One new case of COVID-19 was reported Dec. 23 at Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth, the cleanup contractor at the DOE Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio. There are 23 active cases of the virus at Fluor-BWXT, according to a document shared with Weapons Complex Morning Briefing. The document notes there have been 108 cases at the contractor in 2020 and 85 of those workers have recovered.
The international pandemic continues to take its toll on the United States with more than 19.1 million cases of COVID and 333,000 deaths nationally as of this morning, according to an online tracker, run by Johns Hopkins University.
There was some good news on the pandemic front during the holidays as vaccinations got underway this month. The New York Times reported Dec. 26 that more than 1.9 million people have received the first shot of their two-shot injection of one of the two approved federally-approved vaccines.
