Effective Tuesday, May 25 fully-vaccinated workers at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state will no longer need to wear a face covering, the site’s manager Brian Vance said in an online memo to employees Wednesday.
The directive is slated to go into effect about a week after all-hands letter from Vance to the Hanford workforce saying to keep wearing masks at the site until management there digested the recently-loosened COVID-19 policy on face coverings from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.
Meanwhile, the Hanford Site, like others overseen by the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, continues to lean heavily on telework and that won’t change, Vance said.
“The success of implementing this change in COVID-19 protocols for those fully vaccinated relies on the integrity of each member of our workforce to act responsibly and respectfully,” Vance said. “When this change is implemented on 25 May, individuals who have not been fully vaccinated should continue to wear face coverings to protect themselves and others from the continuing threat of COVID-19.”
“Additionally, there may be situations when fully vaccinated individuals continue to wear masks, either as a personal choice or as advised by their health care provider,” Vance said. “Please continue to respect the personal choices of others.”
The letter also notes that people are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after receiving their second injection of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, or two weeks after receiving their single-injection Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
Granholm announced during a Monday town hall meeting for DOE employees that, in keeping with revised guidelines announced last week by the CDC and the White House, fully-vaccinated people will no longer be required to to wear face coverings at agency properties. The word was also circulated in a DOE newsletter.The DOE encourages, but does not require, its workers to get vaccinated against the coronavirus and grants personnel some time off to do so.
Well before Hanford turned the corner, installations such as the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina announced that mask requirements were being dropped for the fully-vaccinated.
A few others were slower to enact the change. Aside from Hanford, two other locations as of Tuesday morning, the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and the Paducah Site in Kentucky, were “for now” keeping their mask rule in place, a DOE spokesperson said at the time. There was no immediate update available on the mask rules of Portsmouth and Paducah at deadline Friday; spokespersons for the sites did not reply to requests for an update by deadline.
Active Confirmed COVID Cases at EM Around 100 for Week
Across the 16 cleanup sites overseen by Environmental Management, there are currently 106 confirmed active cases of COVID-19, a DOE spokesperson said in a Thursday email. That is up 30 from the 76 reported last week. But the numbers are still far below the 400-plus recorded for most weeks in January.
As of this morning, there are 22 employees at the Savannah River Site currently quarantined with COVID-19, which is up from 17 last week, according to a DOE website run by a contractor.
Five Hanford employees have reported positive COVID-19 tests since last Friday, according to a DOE website for Hanford run by a Leidos-led contractor. At the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, the prime contractor announced this week there had been no new cases for the past week. That marked nine consecutive weeks where the cases have either been zero or in the low single digits.
As of Thursday about 38% of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated, according to reporting by National Public Radio.
Since the pandemic started spreading in the United States during early 2020, there have been roughly 33 million cases of COVID-19 and more than 588,000 deaths from the illness, according to a coronavirus tracker run by Johns Hopkins University.
