The Department of Energy confirmed five new cases of COVID-19 among the staff of its Washington, D.C., area headquarters, including someone who was at the office recently, in a statement posted online Friday.
That makes at least 20 cases among the Washington DOE civil service, most of whom work in either the Forrestal Building in downtown D.C., or the Germantown Building in nearby suburban Maryland.
One of the employees with a newly confirmed case was apparently working in Germantown just before receiving a positive test result, according to the statement. That set off a round of office cleaning and contact tracing, which could result in some of this person’s colleagues quarantining.
“[O]ne Germantown employee required notifications of close contacts, and areas where the individual worked are being sanitized,” DOE said.
Normally, about 7,000 federal employees and support contractors work in the headquarters buildings, including about 1,000 National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) employees. The majority of DOE and NNSA headquarters employees have been working remotely since March.
The Department of Energy largely shut down Forrestal and Germantown from mid-March to early June, with some essential employees and top-level managers reporting to the offices there occasionally. By June 8, the start of Phase 2 of DOE’s four-phase reopening plan, some 1,400 of the 7,000 headquarters employees had returned to the office.
But with COVID-19 cases still climbing and schools in the Washington area poised to keep students mostly out of the classroom this fall, Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette has said the agency will not proceed to Phase 3 of the reopening anytime soon. Phase 3 would mark a return to essentially pre-COVID-19 operations.
