The Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories started offering limited COVID-19 tests for its employees last week, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory could start testing this week, according to a senior state official.
Sandia is for now only testing federal employees, contractors, and subcontractors at its Albuquerque campus, a spokesperson for the weapons-engineering lab said Monday. Appointments are drive-through only, and those who want a test must request one from the lab’s medical clinic.
“Sandia will use a risk-based screening approach, informed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the New Mexico Department of Health guidelines, to determine who will be tested,” the Sandia spokesperson said. “This testing will help Sandia reduce community spread of COVID-19 among workforce members who still need to work on campus to conduct critical national security work.”
It was not clear how many people Sandia had tested at deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
New Mexico Secretary of Health Kathyleen Kunkel disclosed the labs’ ongoing and planned testing at the beginning of a press conference streamed live Thursday on Facebook.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory “hopes to be up and doing testing … in the next week, potentially,” Kunkel said at the time.
“Los Alamos National Laboratory has not performed any testing,” a lab spokesperson wrote in an email on Monday. The spokesperson would not say when the world’s first nuclear weapons design lab might start testing for the disease, or whether it would test employees only.
On its website, Los Alamos said it is “leading a Department of Energy–wide laboratory working group on COVID-19 testing and participating in assessments of lab capabilities for near- and long-term testing requirements, both for public health and for the Los Alamos enterprise.”
A spokesperson for New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said Monday that “[b]oth labs are working on getting to the point of assisting in testing the broader population.”
A spokesperson for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California said it is not testing for COVID-19.
Meanwhile, Los Alamos has confirmed the first case of COVID-19 among the workforce of lab management contractor Triad National Security, according to the local Los Alamos Reporter. Overall. it is the third confirmed case at Los Alamos, where two workers with N3B Los Alamos, the legacy waste-cleanup contractor for DOE’s Environmental Management office, came down with cases.
