The number of confirmed active cases of COVID-19 at the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup worksites had as of Thursday declined to 106 from 132 last week, but the Hanford Site in Washington state is warning workers not to grow complacent.
The figure for the entire DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM) complex, provided by a spokesperson at headquarters in Washington, is still higher than the 101 cases recorded two weeks ago.
During April and May the weekly confirmed cases across EM have ranged from 101 to 136.By comparison in mid-January, when few people of working age were vaccinated, EM logged a weekly case count of more than 470.
Managers at Hanford Site in Washington state learned Tuesday and Wednesday that seven more workers have tested positive for COVID-19, according to a contractor-run website for the federal cleanup property.
In a pair of online announcements, the Hanford Site’s 11,000 employees were urged to remain vigilant due to a rise of cases in the surrounding Benton and Franklin Counties and discovery of certain variants or muted forms of the coronavirus in Washington state.
“COVID-19 cases are on the rise in our community,” Dr. Karen Phillips, M.D., Hanford’s occupational medical director said in a Tuesday memo. HPMC Occupational Medical Services, the healthcare contractor at the site, has Moderna COVID-19 vaccination appointments available for Hanford workers, Phillips goes on to say.
Meanwhile, in a Monday notice, DOE management at the former plutonium production complex stressed that pandemic precautions are not going away just yet. “As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to learn more about COVID-19 vaccines and their effectiveness, they have, in some instances, relaxed previously established COVID-19 protective measures.
“At the Hanford Site, we follow our General Hazard Analyses and have always taken a conservative approach to safety,” according to the Monday notice. “At this time, there have been no changes to our sitewide COVID-19 safety protocols.”
Elsewhere in the old weapons complex, there were at deadline 32 employees currently quarantined with COVID-19 at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, down from 52 last week, according to a site spokesperson.
At the end of the first quarter of 2021, the DOE Office of Environmental Management has had 4,600 confirmed cases of the virus among its federal and contractor workforce since the pandemic started spreading domestically early in 2020. There have been 21 deaths among the nuclear cleanup staff as a result of the coronavirus, a spokesperson said last week.
Earlier this week President Joe Biden announced a new target of having 70% of the U.S. adult population injected with at least one shot of vaccine by the July 4th holiday. The administration also hopes to have 160 million adults fully vaccinated by then.
Thus far in the pandemic there have been 32.6 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 580,000 deaths nationally, according to an online tracker run by Johns Hopkins University.
