Da Nang is a city of 1 million and the Roosevelt has ~5000 sailors on board. It just seems somewhat fantastical that the 3 confirmed positive people in the entire city of Da Nang managed to get a sailor sick asymptomatically and then nobody else in the entire city of Da Nang. Someone getting sick from a city with no community spread is unlikely but whatever. A ship only finding the first sign of symptoms after 15 days at sea is unlikely but whatever. The combination of the two just multiplies the unlikeliness. It’s like watching a Rube Goldberg machine and assuming it formed naturally. The more steps along the way, the more implausible it becomes.
On the contrary, if some adversarial force figured out a way to remotely infect a US aircraft carrier 10 days after it had left port, it’s also an unlikely scenario but it would also explain the same set of facts.
Like I said from the start, I’m not discounting either scenario. Genetic sequencing of the virus both aboard the ship and of the British tourists would provide definitive proof either way. It’s possible to seed people with a version of the virus but it wouldn’t be possible to seed them with the specific genetic mutation that the tourists have. If it’s an exact match, then yeah, that was the transmission path. If it’s from a completely different line, then they need to figure out exactly where it came from.
I don’t think we as civilians will ever know the truth about this. But the US military should definitely be looking at this closer and pin down like, exactly which bar did the British tourists meet one of the Roosevelt’s sailors and how did the transmission happen and does that sailor have antibodies despite never showing symptoms and the rest.
If this does prove to be the transmission path, the US Navy also needs to do a post-mortem about how, given they knew the day they set sail that the tourist was tested positive, why did they not contact trace and preemptively quarantine all the sailors who could have plausibly been in contact with the tourist and how did it take them 15 days to realize community spread was happening on their ship?
My point is that ‘not handling the immense pressure appropriately’ is the kind of thing that happens when people have a headache, or a fever, or low blood-oxygen levels. I don’t have to agree with the Democrats to think that sickness does that to people.
I am not convinced that Crozier was sick at the time he made those decisions. What proof do YOU have that he was? Because I very much doubt you are his personal physician.
The sailors and the British tourists were not just random people who were staying in a city of one million; at least some of the sailors were staying in the very same hotel as the Brits. The number of people in the hotel was certainly much less than a million, probably much less than 5,000, and it’s quite plausible they crossed paths in the lobby or the elevators or the restaurant. While the sailors were ordered back to the ship and quarantined when the news broke that the tourists had tested positive, I don’t see it as “fantastical” that a sailor might have managed to infect another crew member who was not quarantined, or perhaps the quarantine compliance was less than perfect. All it would take was one single unquarantined and asymptomatic carrier to spread the virus to other crew, and estimates of asymptomatic infection rates are all over the place, ranging from 10 to 80 percent.
On the other hand, the Brits might have had nothing to do with the sailors, but I don’t see it as anything close to as unlikely as you do.
Ah ok. If the sailors were staying in the same hotel as the British tourists then I completely withdraw my speculation. The transmission path is 100% plausible then. I also wasn’t aware that people were constantly flying on and off the ship while at sea. That’s also another plausible transmission path.
It would be interesting to find out how, despite them being aware of possible contact with a confirmed case, the quarantine wasn’t effective. Would be good learning for other situations where an effective quarantine needs to be set up.
Doing a truly effective quarantine can be surprisingly hard. Even for medical professionals. I very much doubt an aircraft carrier normally has an infectious disease specialist on board.
I’m not convinced that Crozier was well at the time he made those decisions. What proof do YOU have that he was? Because I very much doubt that you are his personal physician.
I find it curious that you want to attribute his actions to illness rather than to his own free will, sense of duty, perspective on the problem, ethics, etc.
You view what he did as an error, a mistake, a flaw.
I am willing to consider that he valued the safety and lives of his men (and women) above that of a career and made a conscious decision to get help for them even at cost to himself.
You are correct - this is not normally something carrier captains do. But then, we don’t usually have a new, epidemic disease breaking out on board a ship like that either. These are not normal times.
Saving lives should not be seen as an “error”. Usually it’s considered a laudable and selfless act. Why do you see it as a mistake in this case?
My first guess would be “dense, crowded, on-board living conditions”. You know, conditions that have been present for thousands of years on board Navy ships.
Kind of crazy that they couldn’t keep an infection off the ship while at sea with only a limited number of ingress and egress points. It sounds like one of the literally easiest control points to manage, especially with everyone on board so freaked out after a close encounter from on shore.