The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has now logged two straight weeks with confirmed, active COVID-19 cases below the 200 mark.
There are 139 confirmed, active cases of COVID-19 within the nuclear cleanup complex, an Environmental Management (EM) spokesperson said by email Thursday morning. That is down from 180 cases last week and 232 two weeks ago.
This is the lowest EM confirmed active weekly total since the 141 reported by the office during the first week of November.
The weekly EM case was as high as 477 confirmed active cases in early December and nearly equaled that figure, at 473, during the week ended Jan.15. The numbers have been on a fairly steady decline since then. The cleanup complex registered 2,600 cases of COVID-19 during 2020, according to EM.
The Hanford Site in Washington state confirmed five positive cases on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to a DOE website run by a contractor for Hanford. Hanford appears to have recorded roughly 670 COVID-19 cases since the pandemic took root in the United States early in 2020, based upon website updates and prior public statements by management there.
As of Friday, there were 43 workers at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina quarantined with COVID-19, down from 67 the prior week. That is according to an update posted on a contractor-run website.
The DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico reported only one new case of COVID-19 at the transuranic waste site between Feb. 25 and March 3. In addition, WIPP management is monitoring two employees who have yet clear health protocols that would allow them to return to work, according to a Thursday Facebook post from prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership. There were two new confirmed cases of the virus last week and the weekly total has remained in the low single digits in recent weeks.
Since Dec. 14 roughly 16% of the U.S. population has reached at least one shot of a two-shot regime to combat the virus, according to a March 3 report by National Public Radio. In addition, some people are this week starting to receive the new single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine which just received Food and Drug Administration approval over the weekend.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) made news this week when he announced the Lone Star state was lifting its facial mask mandate. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) also announced his state was lifting the mandate. The moves riled President Joe Biden, a Democrat, who called the actions examples of “Neanderthal thinking.”
As for EM, it does not have properties in Texas or Mississippi, but President Biden’s executive order requiring mask-wearing remains in place for all federal employee contractors and everyone in federal buildings or on federal lands, the EM spokesperson said.
As of Friday morning, there were 28.8 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States and 520,000 deaths as a result, according to an online tracker run by Johns Hopkins University.
