Less than a week after former Navy Secretary Thomas Modly boarded the USS Theodoore Roosevelt (CVN-71) and insulted the ship's former captain, Brett Crozier, and admonished the crew for cheering for him, a member of the crew has been killed by the novel coronavirus.
The number of total cases identified among the ships crew has also risen to and may surpass 600 today.
Washington (AFP) - A sailor who was aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier died Monday of COVID-19, the first fatality from nearly 600 confirmed cases among its crew, the US Navy said Monday.
The sailor, who tested positive on March 30, was discovered unresponsive on April 9 and placed in the intensive care unit of the Navy's hospital in Guam, where the Roosevelt is docked.
The death came six days after Thomas Modly resigned as acting navy secretary over his mishandling of an outbreak on the Roosevelt, one of two US aircraft carriers in the western Pacific.
There were fewer than 100 cases of the virus identified among the ships crew when Captain Crozier wrote a letter to the Pentagon asking for permission to offload his crew into quarantine.
Crozier was relieved from duty because of that letter, but it seems abundantly clear to me that he saved the lives of countless crew members by writing it.
At least 92 percent of the crew has been tested at this point according to the French press and I believe we can infer than a significantly higher portion of them would have contracted the virus if they weren't isolated to the greatest extent possible last week. As many as 600 cases among a crew of nearly 5,000 is a lot, but it could have been much worse.
The official position of Trump's appointed service secretaries is that Crozier unnecessarily caused a panic and harmed military readiness by writing the letter that was first leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle, but who knows how many members of the crew could have been infected if he didn't write it? Could as many as half of the sailors aboard the ship be infected by now if he did nothing?
The Trump regime would like to bury Crozier and salt the earth above him, but he should be commended by the next administration.