The Anderson County Department of Health is scheduled Sunday to offer free COVID-19 tests in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
The department, part of the government for the host county of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site and Y-12 National Security Complex, will offer tests from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. local time at Roane State Community College’s Oak Ridge campus, 701 Briarcliff Ave., according to a notice posted by the city.
The Tenneessee Department of Health planned to release more information about the scheduled tests by the country department “in the coming days,” the Oak Ridge city government said.
A spokesperson for the state agency on Tuesday declined to share further details about the planned tests.
Tennessee, a state of nearly 7 million people, had performed around 108,000 COVID-19 tests at deadline, according to the Department of Health. The state has previously offered limited free testing to asymptomatic patients, though not all county and city governments have expanded testing beyond those with symptoms.
East Tennessee’s entire defense-nuclear apparatus has reported cases of COVID-19: the Y-12 National Security Complex, naval nuclear fuel vendor Nuclear Fuel Services, and the Watts Barr nuclear plant. Y-12 is the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) manufacturing site for nuclear-weapon secondary stages. Watts Bar, operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority, helps make tritium for nuclear weapons.
Y-12 has gone down to the bare minimum staffing level required to sustain priority NNSA missions. The site won’t say how many people those operations require, but it is far fewer than the roughly 5,000 who normally work there. The site plans to emerge from its minimum mission-critical operations status around June.
In Anderson County, there have been 21 confirmed cases of COVID-19 since the virus arrived in the U.S. in late January. Of those, 13 people had recovered and one died as of Tuesday, according to data gathered by the Tennessee Department of Health.
