Confirmed active COVID-19 cases at National Nuclear Security Administration sites rose 40% during June and the first week of July and the rising case rates prompted at least one site to reinstate some pandemic rules for personnel that it had previously stopped observing.
The semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapons agency had 764 confirmed cases, up from 547 confirmed cases at the end of May, a spokesperson at headquarters in Washington said Friday in an email to Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
COVID-related fatalities across the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) nuclear enterprise remained at 38, flat since March, according to NNSA statements provided to the Monitor.
The increase in the NNSA’s COVID rate over June, high as it was, was significantly lower than the increase the agency reported for May, when active, confirmed cases among onsite personnel more than quadrupled compared with the month before. The agency, like the broader DOE, counts only cases and deaths confirmed among people reporting to work at federally owned sites.
Nationally, the average daily increase in confirmed, new COVID-19 infections remained about flat in March, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention. The seven-day moving average of new daily cases for July 6 was about 106,000, up from about 100,000 on Memorial Day. The figure shows the mean average of the most recent seven days worth of new cases.
The most recent average daily case rate was much higher than the roughly 28,000 a day reported a year ago, but also much lower than during the peak of the omicron wave in the winter, when the average daily case rate in the U.S. was more than 800,000, according to the CDC. From the post-omicron trough of about 10,000 a day in late March, the average daily U.S. case rate rose steadily until hitting a plateau of around 100,000 during the final weeks of May.
Meanwhile, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, management called after the Independence Day holiday for masks to again be worn for all indoor and close-proximity work.
“Effective July 5, all individuals, regardless of vaccination status, must wear a face mask while indoors, working within six feet of others, or riding in a vehicle with others,” according to the laboratory’s COVID Hub website.
On June 30, the COVID-19 community level moved to high in Los Alamos County, “meaning the mask requirement went back into effect,” a DOE spokesperson for Los Alamos wrote this week in an email.
