After a dip last week, the number of confirmed, active cases of COVID-19 among onsite workers for the Department of Energy’s office of Environmental Management rose by 50 this week to 169, almost back to the 171 cases logged two weeks ago.
The numbers for non-telecommuting Environmental Management (EM) workers, provided Thursday by a federal spokesperson, shows the virus continues to affect nuclear cleanup operations.
“There are a lot of people getting COVID,” some more than once, said an executive with a small contractor for DOE. In addition, many are also getting the flu, so it hurts staffing, the manager added.
The BA.5 variant, a less-lethal but very contagious version of COVID-19 is currently the most common strain of the virus in the United States, media outlets including National Public Radio have reported recently.
In keeping with federal guidance on COVID-19, many DOE nuclear weapons complex sites are again requiring masks indoors.
On Thursday, The Hanford Site in Washington state issued a memo to employees saying to be prepared to resume indoor masking effective July, because the community transmission rate for Benton and Franklin Counties is now deemed “high” in data tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Other re-masked locales include the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, the Paducah Site in Kentucky, their joint headquarters office in Lexington, Ky. All three have “high” community rates, according to county-by-country transmission data from the CDC.
The DOE COVID-19 workplace policy is tied to CDC community numbers.
“They are all in red,” a DOE spokesperson said, referring to resumption of indoor mask rules at properties covered by the Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office. Fayette County (Lexington office) and McCracken County (Paducah Site) both have high community rates as does Pike County, Ohio (Portsmouth Site), according to the CDC website.
In Los Alamos County, N.M., where DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory is located, the communited rate improved to “medium” on Friday from “high” earlier in the week. Los Alamos had recently reimposed masking.
The community rate is medium as of Friday in Grand County, Utah, where the Moab tailings reclamation project is located. Moab is unique in that most of its staff work outside and many employees are heavy equipment operators who work solo, a spokesperson said Thursday.
In South Carolina, the prime contractor for the Savannah River Site, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, is reinstating mask rules as community rates for surrounding Aiken and Barnwell Counties only recently clicked up to “high.” Effective July 11, masks were required at the federal property during indoor meetings or while traveling with vehicles with other people, the prime contractor said in the memo to employees.
Other counties in the DOE weapons complex with high community levels include Alameda County, Calif. (Livermore National Laboratory); and Ventura County, Calif. (Santa Susana Field Laboratory)
The community rate is medium however, in Eddy County, N.M., (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant); Cattaraugus County N.Y. (West Valley Demonstration Project) and Bonneville County, Idaho (Idaho National Laboratory).
Nye County, Nev., where the sprawling Nevada National Security Site is based, is in the medium category; as are Anderson and Roane Counties in Tennessee (Oak Ridge Site), according to CDC data posted Friday.
