Active COVID-19 cases at the National Nuclear Security Administration fell almost 47% in June as vaccination rates across the country continued to inch upward and life returned to something resembling pre-pandemic normalcy at the start of the summer.
Active cases at the DOE nuclear weapons agency had at deadline fallen to 51 in the last full week of June from 87 in the final week of May, down 36. There was a sharp drop-off between the first and second weeks of June, when active cases fell by 25, according to data provided in June by a National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) spokesperson in Washington.
The NNSA had about 1,000 active cases every week in December, when the pandemic was at its height in the U.S.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the seven-day moving average for new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. was 11,343 as of Wednesday. That was the most recent federal data available at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, and down 4% week-over-week from 11,867. In December and January, the figure was closer to 250,000.
At the NNSA’s three nuclear weapons labs, instances of new cases slowed almost to a crawl in June.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory picked up a cumulative 13 cases between the end of May and June 18, the latest date for which data was available, while the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California recorded a total of five new cases in all of June, according to data provided by the labs.
At the Sandia National Laboratory, where the latest public COVID-19 data lags behind one week, 12 new cases popped up between the Friday before Memorial Day and June 18, according to the latest lab data.
That makes about 30 cases for all the labs combined in June. In December and January, each lab was individually besting that total week over week, sometimes by more than double.
