Which failures? The acting SECNAV could have saved his carrier, even after firing the CO, by probably just shutting up and not saying anything. People’s attention span for military matters seems to be fairly short, and I suspect the media would have moved on the very day Modly have his speech to the crew had he either (a) not made it or (b) stuck to a generic “I didn’t want to do it, I know he’s a great guy and you all are doing great things, but I had to for the sake of good order and discipline.” Whether or not it was necessary to fire the CO… that’s a matter of opinion, and appropriate messaging coupled with a lack of care by the public at large could probably have allowed things to go either way. Not having a COVID-19 outbreak or handling it better? shrug how far into the weeds do you want to go? Probably there will be some questions about why the ship was ordered to Vietnam and why the Navy was (and still is) so slow in coming up with realistic measures to safeguard ships crews.
Navy leadership only just seems to be grasping (and still has not grasped fully) that (1) testing for coronavirus, like all testing, is not 100% reliable and (2) people who are asymptomatic or presymptomatic can still transmit the virus. It’s been really frustrating to hear from people still in the Navy that guidance to ships, including TR up until things blew up in the media, has relied so much on “check for symptoms prior to allowing anyone to board the ship.” It just makes me want to scream, “YOU CAN’T STOP THE VIRUS FROM SPREADING TO SHIPS SIMPLY BY TURNING AWAY PEOPLE WITH SYMPTOMS!” See the fiasco with USNS Comfort as a for instance. They supposedly screened 100% of the crew for symptoms and tested for COVID-19, and yet even before they had a chance to contract the coronavirus from the supposedly virus-free patients that weren’t, we learn that at least one of the crew members had it already and just wasn’t showing symptoms initially. Entirely predictable, and yet somehow still a surprise to the Navy’s leadership. You can’t keep entire ship’s crews form being exposed and yet still go on with business as usual.
Navy had plenty of notice. Pentagon and White House didn’t even dither, just ignored it. Remember, these are folks who have forgotten how to win wars. They’re proving just as competent in pandemic response.
This was undoubtedly part of the cluster-fuck that is still revibrating through Australia: the handling of the passengers from the cruise ship Ruby Princess. They should have been unloaded and quarantined. They weren’t, partly because quarantine questions were being asked about “sick passengers”. A week later, after they’d all been sent home, hundreds were sick.
That says that Captain Crozier has tested positive. I did not know that.
From my experienc, people often show significant errors of judgement in the period leading up to their diagnosis with illness. I know almost nothing about the Navy, but that new information does make it easy for me to believe that he might actually have been in the wrong, might actually have made a mistake.
Crozier may have done something wrong in the sense of not toeing the line the current administration wanted him to, but from an ethical viewpoint I don’t see anything he did wrong. He put the health and welfare of the men under his command ahead of his own self and career - which is what a good leader is supposed to do.
The problem with the “chain of command” issue is that former Acting Secretary Moldy had authorised his chief of staff to tell Crozier he could contact their office directly, circumventing the chain of command:
Something doesn’t make sense to me, where the hell did they get infected from? According to the SF Chronicle Article
Vietnam does full contact tracing and isolation of cases, the only two cases active in Da Nang at the time was BN 22 & 23, two British tourists who arrived in Da Nang March 4th, one day before the Theodore Roosevelt arrives on March 5th. Those two tourists managed to spread the virus to BN35, “a salesperson at Green Electronics Supermarket in Hai Chau District, Da Nang” and nobody else in Da Nang before being put into isolation on March 9th.
So the presumed infection path is two British tourists wander around the city at the same time as a bunch of navy sailors, infect precisely two people, one electronics store worker at 6pm on March 4th and then a sailor sometime between March 5th and March 9th. They don’t infect any of the restaurant waiters, service workers or waitstaff in the same venue they infect the sailor. Then not only that, the sailor is one of the 20% of cases that is asymptomatic or close enough that they don’t bother trying to get tested and then it incubates in that sailor for, what? 7 days before they spread it to 3 more sailors that also have an unusually long incubation time before they finally get tested on day 15.
I’m not saying it’s impossible but there’s a lot of really unlikely coincidences that all have to coincide to explain this pattern of facts. I hope they go a full genetic sequencing of soldiers onboard the ship as well as patients 22, 23 & 35 in Vietnam which would definitively prove this transmission path. Otherwise there’s a much more dark possibility that it didn’t come from their shore leave in Vietnam which, assuming the sailors had no other outside contact with the world after that point, would point to a really crazy conspiracy.
The general public will likely never know the truth about this since everything’s going under a deep layer of classification but I hope there are people in the government doing a serious investigation into this and committing serious resources.
The explanation that makes sense is that even with contact tracing there are some number of asymptomatic cases walking around, and tourists, be they servicemen or Brits, tend to go to similar areas. The timing of the infections on board are also more consistent with having had a first case at least as asymptomatic (or at least not noted) and the next three being secondary cases from that individual.
The consensus is emerging that the rate of asymptomatic and minimally enough symptomatic as to not be noted cases is much higher than 20%. The question is how much higher.
Regardless of who the index case in Da Nang was, Da Nang didn’t report another positive case until case 68 who was an American traveller who only arrived back in Da Nang March 14, well after the Roosevelt had left and has only had 6 positive cases in total.
If it wasn’t the British tourists, then again, it’s some unknown person who managed to infect a random US sailor who was in town for a couple of days but then nobody else in the entire city apart from them.
It’s been long enough ago that if there were true community spread in Da Nang, we would definitely know by now as hospitals would be overloaded and there would be confirmed deaths.
It just feels very weird that a ship could get infected and the city of Da Nang did not.
I suppose it’s plausible that some other random tourist flew into Da Nang March 5th or 6th, partied their ass off for 3 days there, flew back home, later developed symptoms but wasn’t contact traced back to VN and spread it in some tourist expat spot that isn’t frequented by any locals.
That still doesn’t explain how it managed to have a 15 day incubation period on the ship before symptoms first emerged. It would be just on the outside of possibility that the people who developed symptoms were 2nd generation infected. After 15 days, you would be getting more into the 3rd generation which means there had to be 2 generations of completely asymptomatic spread. Remember, if patient 1 infected patients 2, 3 & 4 on day 8, then all 3 of them would have to not exhibit symptoms for at least 7 days in order for it to be undetected on day 15.
Only if you are the type of person who attributes to bizarre conspiracies what can be explained by observation and common sense. It is still not known where exactly the virus arose in the first place or by what means. It may not be possible to know. What IS known is that there is a long latency period and a lot of asymptomatic and otherwise undiagnosed infections. Between those last two known facts, it’s pretty obvious that the virus was almost certainly in Vietnam in a much larger population at the time of contact with the ship.
Did the Roosevelt do anything with this information? From all public accounts, it doesn’t appear like they did. At a minimum, they should have immediately quarantined anyone who crossed paths with the British tourists. If they were really paranoid, they should have assumed it was possible that the tourists infected someone March 4th who then went on to infect a sailor on March 8th and they should have steamed back into a port and put everyone into isolation for 14 days.
Then why hasn’t the number of cases in Da Nang itself exploded? Vietnam is doing incredibly well in dealing with Coronavirus. It’s not a matter of undertesting, they’ve performed 120K tests to date and only found 260 cases and haven’t recorded a single death. They publish every single case on a public website along with their movement patterns and isolate presumed close contacts in dedicated quarantine facilities. You can see for yourself a map with a dot for every single location every single case and what times that case was in that location.
Everyone praises Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore for their Coronavirus responses but Vietnam is doing equally as well if not better than all of them. It’s simply not plausible that there’s a huge reservoir of cases that they missed unless you’re presuming the same of every single other country on the planet.
Because they ARE doing incredibly well. Extensive testing and contact tracing can keep an explosion from happening even with some community spread having already occurred if it is started when it is not yet too widely spread. They also were very aggressive in other ways early on. But it strains credulity to think they did not miss some significant number of infected individuals, especially in areas more commonly frequented by those with travel histories.
Even if they were not doing such an incredible job, because it could still be too early. Think Washington state: 1/21 first reported case. 2/19 until several cases reported at an elder assisted living facility (he did not have direct contact there). 2/28 two new cases reported of the same strain that was spreading under the radar without other suspected or diagnosed cases than the assisted living facility for six weeks. How many were out there? Who knows? First death there 2/29. So six weeks to the first death and no observed explosion. (Really hasn’t exploded yet, fairly controlled compared to many other areas.) Without any context of aggressive measures in that first six week period. The current flare in Vietnam began less than 6 weeks ago.
But yes I do presume a fairly large number of cases minimally for weeks before the first significant cohort of diagnosed cases let alone deaths is more the norm than the exception for most countries and most of America’s states.
Even WITHOUT much testing or contact tracing or action of any sort at all it took 6 weeks to go from first diagnosed case to first death. The cases were clearly there. So why would you think that the lack of an explosion in less than six weeks in a location in which is way ahead of that curve in taking action is proof that there was not any significant amount of minimally to asymptomatic cases there?
You had plenty of people in the Seattle area who showed all the symptoms and were clamoring to get tested but were refused testing because they hadn’t travelled back from Wuhan. retrospective testing easily detected those cases.
Asymptomatic carriers don’t transmit a less serious version of the virus than anyone else. They’re no more likely to pass it on asymptomatically than anyone else. You’re presuming there was a pool of asymptomatic carriers that was sufficiently large that it managed to infect someone aboard the Roosevelt in their 5 day stay in Da Nang and also small enough that it has remained undetected to this day, 39 days later. It’s simply too thin a needle to thread.
Remember, the nature of exponential growth is that the bulk of the growth happens in the last few days. Either the cases now are so huge it would be impossible to miss or the cases 39 days ago are so tiny the chances of them infecting a sailor are miniscule.
We know, however, that the British tourists infected an electronics sales clerk; that happened. Why would the chances be so tiny that they managed to infect a second person in their travels around Da Nang, whether that second person was a US sailor or another sales clerk or waiter or random passer-by who remained asymptomatic or perhaps only mildly ill but still managed to infect the sailor?