Even after excluding teleworkers from its accounting of COVID-19 cases around the enterprise, the National Nuclear Security Administration counted 132 active, confirmed cases of the disease among its workforce at the end of April, more than double the tally from the end of March.
At the same time, a spokesperson at agency headquarters in Washington said Thursday, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has not recorded any new COVID-19-related fatalities since March, leaving the total at 38 since the disease was confirmed to have reached the U.S. in January 2020.
The change in accounting at the NNSA, and across the broader Department of Energy, makes it difficult to compare current case rates with records from the last two-and-a-half years of pandemic operations. At this time in March, the agency had confirmed 59 active cases of COVID-19. In February, before the NNSA cut out cases among teleworkers, there were 489 confirmed, active cases.
Like the rest of the DOE, vaccination rates at major NNSA sites are higher than among the general population, running anywhere from 80% to nearly 100%, according to agency figures provided to Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor from the agency and its management and operations contractors.
In February, the agency called most of its federal employees in the Washington, D.C., region back to the office, ending the two-year policy of maximum-telework as the national mood tended toward relaxing pandemic restrictions: ending prohibitions on mass gatherings and mask wearing, including on public transportation.
Meanwhile, the Joe Biden administration’s fight to restore vaccine mandates for federal contractors and civil servants continued what some jurists involved with the cases considered an inevitable march to the Supreme Court. With at least one appeals court decision coming down in the administration’s favor, U.S. attorneys were seeking permission for agencies to resume enforcement of vaccine mandates, which were temporarily suspended in December by a federal judge in Georgia.
