The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management said Friday there were 153 active confirmed cases of COVID-19 at its operations this week — and that the tally it provided last week, 101, was off by more than 50 cases.
The actual number from last week, discovered via audit, was 168, an Environmental Management (EM) spokesperson said in a Friday email before the Weapons Complex Monitor deadline.
“The number of active cases reported this week went up due to an audit,” the EM spokesperson said, after being asked why the caseload appeared to jump about 50% compared with the 101 reported from last week. “The 153 cases reported this week are actually down by 15 from what the number should have been last week.”
The EM spokesperson did not immediately know whether this was a one-week error, or if historical COVID totals might be adjusted too. The latest reported weekly total is higher than the 139 EM reported two weeks ago, but lower than the 180 and 232 confirmed for the last two weeks in February. Two months ago, the active case count for EM was 473. That’s about equal to the high of 477 recorded in early December.
Meanwhile, managers at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico were notified of two new positive cases at the transuranic waste disposal site between March 11 and March 17, prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership said in a Thursday website posting. The facility’s active case count has been in the low single digits for several weeks now.
As of Thursday morning, there were 24 Savannah River Site employees currently quarantined with COVID-19, according to a DOE website for Savannah River run by a contractor. The figure is equal to the 24 recorded last week but down from the 43 logged from two weeks ago.
The president of Savannah River’s prime contractor, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, Stuart MacVean, said in a public meeting this week he hopes up to 3,000 of the site’s 11,000 workers will be at least partly vaccinated within a few weeks.
A DOE spokesperson at the Hanford Site in Washington said management there is not tracking the data for workers and cannot provide an accurate estimate on how many might be vaccinated so far. Hanford’s occupational medical provider, HPM Corp., fully vaccinated 100 medical/first responder employees at Hanford during January, the spokesperson added.
Likewise, a spokesperson at EM’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee said management is not collecting site vaccination data. “While we are encouraging our federal employees to educate themselves and to take advantage of the vaccine when it becomes available to them, we understand it is a personal choice and we are not formally collecting that data,” the spokesperson said.
Since health the COVID-19 vaccinations started in mid-December, roughly 115 million doses have gone into people’s arms, fully vaccinating over 40 million people or 12.3% of the total U.S. population, according to a database updated daily by National Public Radio.
The BBC and other news outlets questioned if United States success in driving down national cases is stalling as some states, such as Texas and Mississippi, are lifting mask mandates and COVID-related restrictions on gatherings. When they appear at public meetings, DOE officials from various sites have repeatedly said during the pandemic that most infections occur while workers are circulating in the community rather than at the jobsite.
As of Friday morning, there had been a cumulative 26.66 million cases of COVID-19 in the United States, resulting in some 539,000 deaths, according to an online tracker run by Johns Hopkins University.
