Confirmed, active cases of COVID-19 among contractors and civil servants working on site at National Nuclear Security Administration facilities more than quadrupled over the month of May, according to data provided Friday by a spokesperson at agency headquarters in Washington.
The semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapons agency had 547 confirmed cases, up from 132 confirmed cases at the end of April. The latest count is higher than February’s, when the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) still included confirmed cases among workers who were telecommuting.
Like the broader DOE, NNSA in March stopped publishing COVID-19 cases contracted by employees who don’t work daily at a government-owned site.
Meanwhile, the NNSA spokesperson said Friday, the agency’s COVID-19 death count remained at 38, the same level where it has hovered since March, according to data provided periodically to the Exchange Monitor by agency spokespersons.
Nationally, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention, the weekly moving average for new cases — the mean daily case count over the most recent seven days — was about 139,000 as of Wednesday, the most recent day for which complete data were available.
That’s much higher than the roughly 18,000 daily average one year ago, much lower than the 800,000 daily average at the peak of the U.S. omicron wave in February, and about equal to the daily case count from August 2021.
COVID-related hospitalizations have risen sharply since the post-omicron winter peak, with the over-70 set posting the sharpest gains and children under 18 the lowest, as has been the case since the disease was first recorded in the U.S. in January 2020. Nationally, hospitalizations rose more than 4.5% week-to-week in the final week of May, hitting a seven-day average of about 3,619. That was still more than 80% lower than during the omicron surge.
NNSA contractors have reported much higher vaccination rates among their workforce than the national average, with inoculation rates ranging from 80% to close to 100% across the nuclear-weapons enterprise, compared with about 66% among people over five years old in the general population, as measured by the CDC.
