A very small percentage of the Department of Energy’s federal employees were scheduled to report back to work in the Washington region today, even as the agency reported one more case of COVID-19 among its headquarters workforce.
The latest positive case, disclosed Friday in a statement from Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette, brings the total confirmed cases at DOE headquarters to at least 17. The latest person who tested positive “was last in the building on May 27,” according to the statement.
The statement did not specify whether this person worked in DOE’s Forrestal building in downtown Washington or at the agency’s Germantown building in nearby suburban Maryland. Some top DOE managers have periodically come to work since the headquarters buildings locked down in March amid the spreading pandemic.
Meanwhile, the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina on Monday confirmed two additional cases of COVID-19. There have now been 25 confirmed coronavirus infections at Savannah River. Of those people, 19 have recovered and returned to work, according to an email from an Energy Department spokesperson. The count includes employees with DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration.
Together, about 7,000 federal employees and support contractors work at DOE headquarters in the Washington area, mostly in Forrestal and Germantown. Roughly 250 of these people in total were scheduled to return to work Monday, DOE said last week. The agency’s NNSA has about 1,000 employees in the capital region.
Energy Department headquarters has a four-phase reopening plan. Monday’s partial reopening marks the transition from Phase 0, in which almost nobody reports to work on-site, to Phase 1, in which mission-critical personnel are expected to come to work. Large communal areas such as cafeterias and gyms are still closed, and people who have self-identified as being particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 still do not have to return to work.
Personnel returning to headquarters for work are asked not to enter their usual buildings if they have been asked to quarantine recently, or if they are running a temperature of more than 100.4. Face coverings are encouraged at DOE headquarters buildings, but not mandatory, according to the agency’s reopening guidelines.
