The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management’s weekly total of confirmed active cases of COVID-19 dropped to 232 this week, down from 296 last week, a spokesperson said in a Thursday email.
The confirmed number of cases for the week before that was 335. The Environmental Management (EM) office has seen its number of active cases decline pretty steadily since the start of 2021. The office had 431 active cases on Dec.31.
The 232 cases this week represent the lowest total recorded in the nuclear cleanup complex since the 194 logged two weeks before Thanksgiving. During 2020, EM confirmed a cumulative total of 2,600 coronavirus infections.
The EM spokesperson said there are roughly 33,000 federal and contractor employees spread across the 16 Cold War and Manhattan Project cleanup properties. However, the spokesperson did not have an estimate on what percentage of those are working onsite these days.
In public presentations, such as the one given last week to the New Mexico legislature by managers of DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, officials say they continue to rely heavily on telework for tasks that can be performed away from the nuclear complex.
At the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant there were only two new cases confirmed between Feb. 11 and Feb. 17, according to a Thursday Facebook posting by prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership. There were three new confirmed cases of COVID during the first full week of February. There are currently six active cases of COVID-19 at the transuranic waste disposal site. By contrast in early November, WIPP managers confirmed 20 new cases of the virus in a week’s time.
“A number of WIPP employees have been vaccinated since they are considered essential workers in support of the national defense mission,” a spokesman for the prime contractor said by email late Feb. 12. The spokesman said he did not provide a more specific estimate on the number of workers receiving shots so far. “We encourage all employees to be vaccinated as they are eligible per the New Mexico Department of Health COVID-19 vaccination criteria/guidelines. “
A week earlier, an EM spokesperson at Hanford said about 100 workers had been vaccinated so far.
National Public Radio reported Thursday that roughly 12% of the U.S. population has received at least one shot of COVID-19 vaccine. The same organization also reported the daily rate of new cases domestically has dropped about 44% over the past two weeks.
On Friday morning, a DOE website run by a contractor for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina reported there are 93 workers quarantined, which is down 41 from the 134 reported one week before.
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to take a heavy toll since establishing a foothold in the United States in early 2020. Altogether there have been roughly 27.9 million confirmed cases domestically and a resulting 493,000 deaths as of Friday morning, according to an online tracker run by Johns Hopkins University.
