Three employees at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site in Washington state are undergoing testing for novel coronavirus 2019 disease (COVID-19), according to updates posted Tuesday on an employee advisory website.
It was not clear from the post if the three included the employee of Hanford services contractor Mission Support Alliance who last Thursday was scheduled to be tested for possible infection.
As of Wednesday morning, the Energy Department Office of Environmental Management had not reported any confirmed COVID-19 infections among federal or contractor employees across its complex for cleanup of 16 Cold War and Manhattan Project nuclear weapons sites.
Domestically, about 6,500 confirmed cases of infection have been recorded, with 123 deaths, as of roughly 8:15 a.m. ET, according to a Johns Hopkins University database.
The Hanford Site has completed cleaning various buildings, under protocols set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where employees who might have been exposed to the virus worked. The repopened sites include the MO-195 office building, as well as the MO-280 and MO-3103 buildings.
Access to the MO-588 building is still restricted pending completion of decontamination. The same goes for access to MO-500 in the 100K Area. Typically, employees who work in buildings targeted for cleaning are urged to monitor themselves for COVID-19 symptoms, such as cough or fever.
In addition, the DOE Office of Environmental Management is instructing employees who attended the Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix last week to work at home for two weeks. Organizers of the nuclear cleanup conference, which drew 2,100 people, have said one person who attended the event is being tested for the coronavirus. One other attendee might be sick with non-COVID-19 maladies, the source said. The two attendees displaying some symptoms are DOE EM employees, according to an agency email.
Numerous representatives from the DOE nuclear cleanup office, including Senior Advisor for Environmental Management William (Ike) White and several site managers, were among speakers and panelists at the event.
