Managers at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state have confirmed six more positive cases of COVID-19 since Saturday.
The latest five were reported Tuesday in a note posted to a DOE website run by a Leidos-led Hanford support contractor.
New cases at the former plutonium production complex have run in the low- to mid-single digits in recent weeks, based on occasional updates posted to the website.
HPMC Occupational Medical Services, the on-site health contractor for Hanford, recently administered 300 shots of the Moderna vaccine for workers at the site.
In Ohio, meanwhile, the local health department for Pike County has a vaccination clinic scheduled today for workers at the DOE’s Portsmouth Site.
As of March 31, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management had confirmed about 4,600 cases of coronavirus infections among its 33,000-person federal and contractor workforce, the office said recently.
The DOE cleanup office encourages but does not require its workers to be vaccinated for COVID-19.
Yesterday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced it was temporarily suspending use of the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine following reports of six potentially significant blood clots developing among the 7 million people who have received this vaccine in the United States.
