Late Friday there was word of seven additional employees at the Department of Energy headquarters at Washington, D.C., testing positive for the coronavirus and four more positive cases across the country at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette talked about the spate of COVID-19 cases at the Forrestal Building in Washington, D.C. during a “Dear Colleagues” email to DOE staff. “Two of the individuals were last in the Forrestal building on 10/27 and one was last in the Forrestal building on 11/2.”
Brouillette said the remaining four people have not been in any headquarters building for months. DOE’s COVID-19 website has not posted public updates about headquarters-area COVID-19 cases for months.
Meanwhile, three cases of COVID-19 at the DOE Office of Environmental Management’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., were reported Friday on the agency’s emergency operations website for the former plutonium production complex. An additional case of the virus was then reported on the same website Sunday.
The unofficial Hanford total of COVID-19 cases is 199, based upon a combination of the daily web posts, and an update last month from the site’s manager, Brian Vance.
Last Friday a spokesperson for the Environmental Management office said there are currently 141 active cases of COVID-19 in the cleanup complex or more than double the 61 recorded a month earlier.
As of late July there were at least 20 cases of COVID-19 among civil servants at DOE headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Cases of the virus have surged nationally. There have now been 10 million cases and 238,000 deaths in the United States as of Sunday evening according to an online dashboard run by The New York Times and Google.