Gen. John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said one member of the crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt was hospitalized Thursday in intensive care on Guam, where the carrier has been docked for more than a week. He said 416 crew members are now infected and that 1,164 test results are pending.
“It’s not a good idea to think that the Teddy Roosevelt is a one-of-a-kind issue,” Hyten told a Pentagon news conference. “We have too many ships at sea. To think that it will never happen again is not a good way to plan.”
The Navy’s top officer, meanwhile, said the biggest problem is the inability to test enough people quickly, including those aboard the USS Nimitz, the next U.S.-based aircraft carrier due to deploy out to sea.
“The challenge that we have now, is having that type of capability where we can test in volume and at speed,” Adm. Mike Gilday said Thursday. “I really don’t have a good estimate right now on when that testing capability might be available in the kinds of quantities we would like to see.”
He said sailors on the USS Nimitz, which is in port preparing for a deployment, will have all movement restricted for two weeks before the ship leaves.
One sailor was taken off the Nimitz more than a week ago after showing symptoms, but the test was not conclusive, the Navy said. Hyten suggested a small number of sailors were ill, but the Navy said Thursday that no sailors currently on the carrier have tested positive for COVID-19 or are showing symptoms.
A retired Navy admiral and former top NATO commander in Europe, James Stavridis, sees trouble ahead.
“Clearly there are more cases to come,” Stavridis said via email. “The Navy and all the services have some hard choices ahead in terms of whether to pull units off the line to get them well or accept some level of casualties due to the coronavirus.”
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