The number of confirmed active cases of COVID-19 among the federal and contractor workforce for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management is up from last week, according to figures provided Thursday by a spokesperson.
There are currently 116 cases across the Environmental Management (EM) complex, which represents an increase from last week’s total of 105, but it is still lower than the 132 recorded two weeks ago.
The DOE’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina reported Friday that 22 employees are quarantined with COVID-19, down one from last week’s total of 23, as reported on a Savannah River website run by a contractor.
Managers at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state have confirmed eight more positive cases of COVID-19 since Saturday, with the latest two reported Wednesday 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.
In a memo Wednesday, Hanford’s occupational medicine contractor, HPMC, reported that all Washington state residents ages 16 and older become eligible for the COVID-19 vaccines this week.
“HPMC Occupational Medical Services has received the Moderna vaccine, and will vaccinate Hanford workers in accordance with this revised statewide eligibility,” according to the Wednesday post. The health contractor recently administered 300 shots of the vaccine for Hanford workers, according to the website.
The administration of President Joe Biden and most states have already announced that all adults will be eligible to receive a vaccine by May.
To date, EM is not requiring workers to receive the vaccine and the success rate of getting workers to take the shot voluntarily varies site by site, one industry source said Thursday by phone, declining to identify the problem sites. Many people have been “exposed or they are sick,” the source said. With nuclear cleanup work to be done, there is a cost to having so many people based off-site for an extended period, this person added.
Managers from various sites have said publicly in recent weeks they continue to employ maximum telework for staff.
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 since the pandemic started spreading in the United States in early 2020.
On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention along with the Food and Drug Administration recommended a pause in the use of Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine. Of the nearly 7 million Johnson & Johnson doses administered so far in the United States, a half-dozen cases of a “rare and severe type of blood clot” have been reported in people after receiving the vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control website.
As of Friday nearly 38% of the American public has received at least one shot of COVID-19 vaccine and about 24% are fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control data. The bad news is that cases are on the rise again and there are a number of “hot spots” with a surging number of hospitalizations, such as Michigan, according to national media outlets.
As of Friday morning, the United States has confirmed about 31.5 million cases of COVID-19 and roughly 565,000 deaths as a result, according to an online tracker run by Johns Hopkins University.
