The Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories has started offering limited COVID-19 tests for its employees, but it was unclear if the weapons engineering lab had tested anyone as of Friday.
Sandia is also “entering into a contract” to provide tests for the general public, but “there’s some federal paperwork that has to be resolved” before that can happen, Kathyleen Kunkel, New Mexico’s secretary of health, said Wednesday in a COVID-19 briefing with Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D). The governor’s office broadcast the meeting on Facebook Live.
Sandia acquires test kits from the New Mexico Department of Health, like other testing centers throughout the state, a spokesperson for the labs said Thursday. The spokesperson would not say how many people Sandia had tested, if any, and did not respond to queries about the potential contract to perform public testing.
On April 9, Kunkel said the Los Alamos National Laboratory might also start testing for COVID-19, possibly as soon as this week. On Monday, a Los Alamos spokesperson said the lab had not tested anyone. The lab did not respond to further requests for comment about the prospective testing program this week.
On its website, Los Alamos said it is “leading a Department of Energy–wide laboratory working group on COVID-19 testing and participating in assessments of lab capabilities for near- and long-term testing requirements, both for public health and for the Los Alamos enterprise.”
A spokesperson for Lujan Grisham said this week that both Sandia and Los Alamos “are working on getting to the point of assisting in testing the broader population.”
Sandia said it does not plan to test all of its employees every day. Personnel must request tests through the lab’s medical clinic. Any tests allowed at the lab will be drive-through only, and by appointment, the lab said.
“Sandia will use a risk-based screening approach, informed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the New Mexico Department of Health guidelines, to determine who will be tested,” the Sandia spokesperson said. “This testing will help Sandia reduce community spread of COVID-19 among workforce members who still need to work on campus to conduct critical national security work.”
Testing for COVID-19 may involve nasal swabs collected at walk-in and drive-through testing stations. Those tested in New Mexico can look up their results online.
New Mexico guidelines, as of this week, allowed for testing people who were asymptomatic but had been exposed to someone who has tested positive; and for people who have symptoms of COVID-19, which can be similar to symptoms of other respiratory illnesses, including influenza.
Sandia had 10 confirmed cases of COVID-19 at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor: six in Albuquerque and four in Livermore, Calif.
Los Alamos, on the other hand, only recently confirmed the first case of COVID-19 among the workforce of lab management contractor Triad National Security, the local Los Alamos Reporter reported Monday. Overall, that was the third confirmed case at Los Alamos, where two workers with N3B Los Alamos, the legacy waste-cleanup contractor for DOE’s Environmental Management office, had already come down with cases.
At deadline Friday, it appeared that only Sandia was the only nuclear weapons lab able to test for COVID-19. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is not testing for COVID-19, a spokesperson said this week.
