There were as of Thursday 296 active, confirmed cases of COVID-19 among personnel in the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, which is 39 fewer than the previous week’s total of 335.
The figure, provided Thursday by an Environmental Management (EM) office spokesperson, marks several weeks of mostly steady decreases in the active cases during the New Year.
Two weeks ago, the figure was still above 400, at 423. This week’s 296 figure represents the fewest active cases of EM-wide COVID-19 since the 282 cases, reported by the cleanup office during the first week of December.
Virtually all of the 16 nuclear cleanup sites overseen by EM continue to employ high levels of telecommuting, along with mask-wearing, physical distancing and other precautions for on-site workers who cannot telework, DOE officials have said in online briefings in recent weeks to various advisory boards and lawmakers.
As of Friday, there were 134 Savannah River Site employees currently quarantined with COVID-19. The number is 29 less than the 163 reported on a DOE operations website for the facility in South Carolina one week earlier.
Thursday night the prime contractor for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant reported that there were only three new cases between Feb. 4 and Feb. 10 at the facility near Carlsbad, N.M. Five people who work at the site have active COVID-19 cases. These people must monitor their symptoms over a period of time before they can return to work, contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership said in the Facebook post.
That is down from a week earlier when there were six positive tests confirmed at the waste disposal complex, which has logged more than 250 cases total since the pandemic began in the United States in early 2020.
Management at WIPP has used testing services provided by Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico during the pandemic, Nuclear Waste Partnership’s president and project manager Sean Dunagan said during a virtual briefing for New Mexico lawmakers on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, managers at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state have received a steady stream of new confirmed cases of the virus since last Friday Feb. 5, according to advisories posted on a Hanford emergency operations website run by a contractor.
Altogether there have been 20 new positive confirmed cases at the site during the past week, bringing the total to roughly 665 confirmed positive cases among the roughly 11,000 workers at the former plutonium production complex.
Since the virus started spreading in the U.S. over a year ago, there had at deadline been about 27.4 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 475,000 deaths as a result, according to a public database run by the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus center.
