Personnel at DOE headquarters in Washington completed their “reentry” to the work place after two years of maximum telework during the COVID-19 pandemic, a spokesperson said Thursday, though headquarters had not yet tallied the exact number of people who returned to their pre-pandemic work stations.
“On Monday, DOE completed its formal reentry process at most sites – including headquarters in Washington, D.C., and Germantown, Md. — when maximum telework ended and some employees began returning to the workplace,” the spokesperson said.
Hard data on the percentage of employees teleworking should be available “in the coming weeks,” the spokesperson said.
Across the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) enterprise, telework remained the norm for almost two years at the nuclear weapons labs, at least for those who were not doing classified or mission-essential work. As recently as early March, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico all reported teleworking rates around 50%.
Receding COVID-19 cases nationally, reflected in plunging case rates at the NNSA, have even prompted a crawl back toward normalcy at some sites. Los Alamos, which has one of the strictest vaccination policies of any DOE defense-nuclear site, dropped its indoor mask mandate for vaccinated people earlier this month.
COVID’s winter omicron wave appeared to recede by the end of February, a month in which the NNSA marked a 70% drop in confirmed active cases. In the roughly two years since physicians and authorities first detected the disease in the U.S., nearly 40 employees at NNSA sites have died from COVID, according to official figures.
