Management at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state has confirmed nine new cases of COVID-19 since Friday.
Bosses at the former plutonium production facility were informed of the latest batch of positive cases, seven, on Monday, according to an advisory posted on a DOE website run by the site services contractor.
The latest infections at Hanford mean there have now been roughly 600 confirmed positive cases there since the pandemic started spreading domestically roughly a year ago.
During 2020, the DOE Office of Environmental Management recorded more than 2,600 cases of the coronavirus at its nuclear cleanup properties. Last week, an office spokesperson said there were 473 active cases in the cleanup complex, which remains one of the highest weekly totals over the past 12 months.
As of Monday morning there has been more than 24 million cases of the virus in the United States and 399,000 deaths resulting from it, according to an online tracker overseen by Johns Hopkins University.
