COVID-19’s grip on the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management continues to loosen, for now anyway, as the number of weekly confirmed cases at the cleanup office declined to 28, down 15 from the prior week’s total of 43, a spokesperson said in a Thursday email.
In another sign of the omicron wave’s retreat, DOE’s Hanford Site in Washington state suspended indoor masking and testing requirements for the week ending March 18.
Also, a DOE spokesperson said Thursday the agency has completed its “reentry” although hard numbers on people working at their pre-pandemic worksites are not available yet.
“On Monday, DOE completed its formal reentry process at most sites – including headquarters in Washington, D.C., and Germantown, Md. — when maximum telework ended and some employees began returning to the workplace,” the spokesperson said. Hard data on the percentage of employees teleworking should be available “in the coming weeks,” the spokesperson said.
Meanwhile the improving COVID situation on federal, state and local levels has enabled to ease mask and testing requirements across the board.
“For the period from March 12 – 18, 2022, the COVID-19 Community Level for Benton and Franklin Counties is low, so federal employees are not required to wear masks or be tested at Hanford Site facilities regardless of vaccination status,” according to a March 11 notice posted on the Hanford website. .
Two weeks ago the Environmental Management’s weekly case count was 65. It was only in early February that the nuclear cleanup complex hit its high of 775 weekly confirmed cases.
So far during the pandemic more than 100 DOE and federal contractor employees at Environmental Management worksites died as a result of COVID-19, Greg Sosson, Environmental Management’s deputy assistant secretary for safety, security and quality assurance, told the Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix last week.
Nationally, more than 969,000 people have died from COVID-19 since the pandemic started to spread in the United States in early 2020, according to figures compiled by the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Center.
