The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is contemplating ways to cope with further spread of the novel coronavirus that broke out in China last year, potentially including postponing conferences and other events, a spokesperson said Thursday.
The agency “has established a Unified Coordination Group from throughout the agency to assess the potential effect of a COVID-19 outbreak throughout the National Security Enterprise,” the spokesperson said by email, using a shorthand name for the disease.
In addition, the semiautonomous Energy Department agency “has asked the labs, plants and sites to explore the feasibility of postponing any large events, workshops or conferences currently planned for the next few months.”
For now, the NNSA has not issued any agency-specific travel advisories, beyond those posted this week by the State Department, which urges U.S. citizens to avoid travel to China (and to wash their hands regularly and avoid contact with sick individuals).
Meanwhile, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is pitching in on the effort to understand how the disease — which is not influenza — may spread. A lab spokesperson said Los Alamos had four funded COVID-19 research projects underway, as of Thursday.
“Some researchers are leveraging tools in place, thanks to our history of research into influenza and other diseases that are often excellent frameworks for outbreaks of other infectious diseases,” the Los Alamos spokesperson wrote. “Our contributions in the field include improved influenza forecasting, web-based tools for genomic data analysis, and comparison of outbreaks to historical data to identify if patterns are repeating.”
According to the Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, which has aggregated data from multiple national and international health organizations, there are just over 100,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 globally. The vast majority of these are in Asia, primarily mainland China, with Europe and Iran also showing advanced outbreaks.
Global deaths attributed to the disease are pushing 3,500, according to Hopkins, but better than 55,000 people have recovered from the disease. There are 240-some confirmed cases in the U.S. — these figures only count people who have actually been tested — and fewer than 20 fatalities domestically.
Influenza, for scale, killed roughly 35,000 people in the 2018-2019 flu season, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates.
