Two more staffers at the Department of Energy’s Washington, D.C., headquarters have tested positive for COVID-19, raising the number of confirmed cases at headquarters to at least three, the agency announced this week.
At the same time, Sandia National Laboratories reported two more confirmed cases, one each among the workforce of its Albuquerque and California sites. The Savannah River Site in South Carolina recorded two more confirmed cases, the local Aiken Standard reported Tuesday. One worker subcontracted to the legacy cleanup prime at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico also caught a case, the facility’s management and operations contractor announced Monday.
The two new cases at Washington headquarters are employees in the Forrestal Building: the main, but not the only, building in the National Capital Region that houses DOE headquarters employees. The employees have not been in the Forrestal Building or had physical contact with agency employees at work since March 19, according to DOE’s press release about the cases.
It was not clear whether the two people confirmed to have COVID-19 had been in physical contact with the first person at Forrestal confirmed to have contracted the disease. That person went on leave from headquarters on March 3.
It likewise was not clear Tuesday whether DOE headquarters had attempted enough contact tracing to determine whether any of the infected, or anyone they had contact with, had contact with Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette.
A spokesperson for Brouillette’s office did not reply to a request for comment. Among the workforces of nuclear sites with either DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM) or National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) missions, there were as Tuesday fewer than 20 confirmed COVID-19 cases, according to information provided by agency and site public affairs offices.
At deadline, the disease had spread to the vicinity of every major Department of Energy defense-nuclear site, active and shuttered. Almost half of these locations had at least one confirmed case among their personnel, at deadline. That counts individuals supporting both EM, NNSA, and DOE headquarters.
COVID-19 is the disease caused by the novel coronavirus that broke out in Wuhan, China, last year, and which was confirmed at deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing to have infected more than 870,000 worldwide, killing over more than 43,000 people.
No country has more confirmed cases of COVID-19 than the U.S., which had nearly 190,000 at deadline, with more than 4,000 deaths.
