As of close of business Wednesday, nuclear cleanup sites managed by the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management had 381 active cases of COVID-19 scattered across its workforce, a spokesperson for the office said this week.
The figure, while still high, is down 50 from the 431 active cases cited on Dec.31.
As for 2020 as a whole, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) recorded a total of 2,600 coronavirus infections the spokesperson said.
On Wednesday, 18 workers at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state told management they had tested positive, according to a bulletin posted on a DOE Hanford operations website run by the Leidos-led Mission Support Alliance.
The latest batch of positive tests brings the total number of COVID-19 cases at the former plutonium production facility to more than 580 since the pandemic began in the United States early in 2020.
As of Friday morning, there were 213 employees quarantined with COVID-19 at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, according to the facility’s emergency operations website. The figure is up 17 from the 196 reported Dec. 28.
The pandemic continues to exert a heavy toll. As of Friday morning the United States had confirmed roughly 21.6 million cases of the illness with more than 365,000 deaths, according to an online virus tracker run by Johns Hopkins University.
