I think many astute readers will have questions the ASECNAV does not want to hear.
It, and the other field hospitals, are designated for people who are being hospitalized for something other than COVID.
So the carrier visit is a critical piece of geo-politics, driven by our relations with the Philippines and Vietnam and China. And it would have been absolutely impossible for the Captain to have made any kind of tactical decision contradicting that.
So we can see that the original sin lies in Washington, and the great fear, the loss of confidence, is that the Captain might come out and say that.
For a warship, quarantine may well be the proper response. In the close quarters of a warship, it’s likely that everyone who’s going to be infected already is. But the people on board are selected for youth and physical fitness, and this disease has an extremely low mortality rate for the young and fit. If they stay out at sea for the next few weeks, there might be a few deaths (though even that isn’t a given), but they won’t be infecting anyone else.
If someone suggested that Jared Kushner is going to take over the ship… well, I wouldn’t bet against it.
I had to roll up my pant legs and put on boots when I read that. The captain’s crew was in dire straits, and the Navy bigwigs were “coordinating” and “taking into consideration.”
By the time an “official” response arrived, the flight deck would have been covered in bodies.
Reminds me of the horrendous mess with the USS Pueblo. The blame for everything was heaped upon the captain, Lloyd Bucher.
Bucher was a hero to his crew, as this captain will alway be to the Roosevelt crew.
~VOW
A lot of military people who treat are PAs and NPs. They can prescribe a lot of drugs, but there are classes of drugs they can’t prescribe, and they are used to treat things like cancer and addiction. Basically, anything which is commonly abused.
If addicts are going to die of withdrawal because no one can prescribe Valium or methadone, and cancer patients who would go to the ER for pain relief can’t get it, it’s no use bringing those people there.
It’s also highly unlikely that a Navy doctor or other type of personnel (different in the Army, which does deal with indigenous populations), will EVER have seen a case of anything for which there is a vaccine, because people in the military are not allowed to have objections to vaccines, nor are they likely to ever have seen a disease that is a complication of advanced HIV/AIDS.
Aside from not having any experience with these ailments, if the ship is docking with just the supplies it has, and nothing else, it literally CAN’T treat such patients.
Personally, mine would be is his dick is long enough to reach his asshole.
In this era when the unthinkable becomes the actual near-daily, frankly, that would be perhaps one of the less surreal things to happen.
And if anything happened to the ship, you know who’d be the first one off. Rats do leave sinking ships, after all.
This thinking misleading at best and catastrophic at worst. Healthline: “ Nearly 40% of Those Hospitalized for COVID-19 Are Under 55”
In the confined spaces and lack of open ventilation in an aircraft carrier, the viral load will be higher which is correlated with more severe and faster onset of COVID-19. And even on aircraft carriers with thousands of crew, the sick bay facilities are limited and not set up for long term care of critically ill patients because such casualties would normally be medivac’d to land-based medical care at the earliest opportunity.
Even if the contagion has already swept through the crew (very likely given to confined work spaces, shared living quarters, and common cafeteria areas) getting the known infected crew off the ship both frees up space to isolate and support non-critical patients and gets more critically ill patients closer to adequate care facilities or, in the case of death, not being stacked in the kitchen reefer because there is no place to store a significant number of corpses on the ship.
There are way too many people in and outside of government trying to treat this pandemic as “business as usual” rather than the ongoing health catastrophe that it is, and that unwillingness for face fact and take effective action is going to have repercussions long after the epidemic is extinguished.
Stranger
In an [url=https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/opinion/coronavirus-crozier-roosevelt.html] Op-ed in the Times today, Theodore Roosevelt’s great-grandson notes that TR has something similar happen to him. After the Spanish American War a lot of troops remained in Cuba, threatened by yellow fever and malaria. There were calls to bring them home, but the Secretary of War refused, Career military leaders there didn’t feel they could protest, fearing for their careers, but Roosevelt, as a short-term volunteer, wrote a fiery open letter which wound up in every paper in the country, and shamed the Secretary of War into bringing the troops home to quarantine, saving many lives.
I’ll also point out that an aircraft carrier requires hundreds of crew just to keep the vessel in operation, notwithstanding those necessary to conduct routine flight operations. If there is a sudden epidemic that sickens a significant portion of the crew on a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier resulted in degraded crew performance and safe operation of the vessel, it puts that major capital asset at risk, notwithstanding the ongoing problems the US Navy has been having with staffing and training vessels. Even balancing the need to maintain a military presence against the potential for a serious accident, it would make sense to at least evac crew presenting symptoms and monitor the rest when they go on- and off-shift. Just pretending like all is normal puts not only the entire crew but that multi-billion dollar strategic asset at risk.
Captain Crozier may have violated regulations; I doubt what he did is a court marshal offense but even if it is, he did the right thing by going outside a chain of command that was not addressing his concerns and making the wider Navy community aware of the grotesque lack of action. And whoever leaked that memo to the San Francisco Chronicle did the right thing by highlighting a leadership failure within the upper military and government executive management. Of all critical areas of government, the military should be most aware and responsive to a threat with the potential to risk national security and the lives of thousands of servicepeople.
Stranger
I have a suspicion that the ship could’ve been set up to take a wider variety of patients if they had more time. But the Liar-in-Chief told the world it was ready to go and on its way —— so they set sail before they were properly outfitted and now it’s pretty much useless.
Just my guess. But I bet it’s true.
To be fair, he looks adorable in his sailor suit.
Like this, maybe, less than a year ago?: https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/05/30/white-house-tells-navy-to-keep-destroyer-mccain-out-of-sight-during-trump-visit-to-japan-report-says/
So hard to believe Trump is our CIC.
I am sad to see him get raked over the coals, but glad he cared enough for his command to do so.
Chain of command doesn’t work. I had tried to go chain of command to get word to mrAru that he needed to be tested for a specific health issue, and was stonewalled by his command, so I sidestepped and went to the Red Cross and Chaplains to get word to him to get tested. This was back in the ‘good old days’ of the familygram [25 words, absolutely NO bad news of any sort …, 6 per cruise] On the plus side, he did test negative, but did get teased for the cruise for ‘sheep hiv’ :smack:
Even the Diamond Princess cruise ship had a less than 1% mortality rate, and that’s with cruise ship demographics, which skew much older and less-healthy than the general population, let alone the military population.
As for endangering the ship itself, over half of those infected show no symptoms at all. Any naval vessel can be adequately maintained in peacetime operations with 50% crew.
This ship certainly isn’t ready to go off and fight a war right now. But it would be even less ready if you evacuated everyone off of it
On the Diamond Princess once contagion was recognized they essentially locked down the passengers and instituted the standard infection hygiene protocol with the crew, which was wholly inadequate for SARS-CoV-2, but at least is prevented close contacts. Patients presenting serious symptoms were evacuated and at least the ship received medical support by Japanese authorities once it docked in quarantine.
On an aircraft carrier or other warship, on the other hand, there really isn’t any way to isolate a significant amount of infected crew, nor is there any possibility of ‘social’ (physical) distancing to limit exposures. Gangways are tight, most crew have shared quarters and lavatory facilities, the enlisted all eat in one mess, and people are constantly on top of one another. What we have seen in those kinds of conditions is higher incidence of serious or critical illnesses presumably due to the higher viral exposure and poor air exchange, and again, the idea that younger people just don’t suffer serious symptoms in significant numbers is not correct even if the case fatality rate goes up with age bracket.
As previously noted, the sick bay just doesn’t have facilities for long duration intensive care for more than a handful of patients so even a few percent that need significant care will overwhelm the medical faculties, so at a minimum evacuation patients who are presenting serious symptoms and may require support is critical to protecting the rest of the crew and safe operations of the vessel. No one has suggested evacuating the entire ship and abandoning it, but evacuating all but a skeleton crew and then making provisions to rotate people back in as they are shown to have been exposed and developed immunity would be the smart plan. Instead, it appears that the Navy senior command decided to do nothing and see how it goes, which is just craven negligence and irresponsibility to an extreme.
Stranger