Five days after the first case of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, a sailor stationed aboard the USS Ohio tested positive for the virus, in what was the first outbreak among team members aboard a Navy submarine.
The ship’s leaders faced an overwhelming challenge in the face of what was then a disease that was far from understood, with limited COVID-19 control kits and a vaccine in several months.
“We saw this as an impediment to readiness and a risk to our sailors,” said Chris Kline, former deputy commander of the submarine squadron that includes the USS Ohio. “We understood the nature of a submarine. It’s like a giant petri dish. If he gets sick, a lot of other people get sick. “
Documents received through Kitsap Sun through a Freedom of Information Act app show, for the first time publicly, how the Navy thwarted the virus through what has become a widely followed strategy for each and every one, from sports leagues to daycare: the bubble. the inflamed sailors were isolated. Close contacts in quarantine. But just as important, each and every sailor was screened for asymptomatic cases.
The Ohio, the Navy’s oldest submarine, was fortunate to be docked at Pearl Harbor during the outbreak, where it was conceivable to move sailors to barracks in early spring 2020. However, his example, as well as other Navy epidemics such as that of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, reported on upcoming deployments, such as the 11-month, 99,000-mile global voyage of the USS Nimitz later that year and through 2021.
Kitsap Sun conducted interviews with sailors, from enlisted ranks to retired admirals, and obtained documents through the Freedom of Information Act to unite the Navy’s reaction in the chaotic early days of the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The effects showed that the bubble strategy that emerged quickly, when combined with testing, was effective in keeping Navy ships at sea, but had a physical and mental effect on sailors. Periods of isolation, dressed in a mask 24 hours a day, and confinement in a shipment for extended periods of time were not easy. However, those measures have prevented the spread of COVID-19.
“It’s hard, very difficult for sailors,” said Bryan Wooldridge, a military doctor who served aboard the USS Nimitz. “But I think Navy leaders made the most productive decisions they could at the time. “
The Navy entered the pandemic unprepared. According to the Office of the Inspector General of the Ministry of Defense, 4 of the five commandos of the Navy component (other military leadership teams) conducted a mandatory “pandemic flu and infectious diseases exercise. “
Still, the outbreak on the USS Theodore Roosevelt showed how threatening the virus can be, with 1,331 team members, about a quarter of the team, contracting COVID. Despite how young the ship’s population was, 23 sailors were hospitalized, 4 were admitted to the intensive care unit, and one sailor died. An investigation revealed that control of the USS Theodore Roosevelt had been too quick to get sailors out of quarantine and allowed the opening of spaces not unusual for the outbreak, which sidelined shipping on Guam. .
But the example of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, combined with the experience of the USS Ohio and the destroyer USS Kidd, in which at least 78 sailors caught the virus, scientifically proved that COVID could spread through other people who didn’t even know they had it. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, nearly a portion of all cases of other people who tested positive aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt never developed symptoms.
The challenge for the Navy, like other branches of the armed forces, is to ensure the protection of sailors, but not at the expense of “preparedness” or their ability to fight effectively in combat, even if a pandemic broke out.
“Some idea that we must necessarily shut down the military by postponing all recruitment, ongoing processing, basic training, cash maneuvers, and other activities imperative to maintaining readiness,” wrote Mark Esper, the secretary of defense at the time. in his memoirs, “A Sacred Oath. ” It was neither realistic nor justified, and our effects would eventually prove that it was. “
The USS Ohio is one of the Navy’s 4 guided missile submarines and one of two founded in the Pacific Northwest. The ship, once filled with Trident nuclear missiles, changed in the early 2000s to house up to 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles and deploy special forces such as the Navy SEALs.
It would possibly be self-evident to say that Navy ships, especially submarines, involve sailors running in tight spaces.
“Submarineming is a sport,” Kline said. You’re going to have contact with people. “
A submarine, with a fraction of the length of equipment as an aircraft carrier, has only a limited number of specialists in a critical position to operate, says Henry Hargrove, a senior technical analyst at RAND Corporation and a retired submariner. Its recirculated air means that the entire computer can be exposed to a virus in a short time.
“It’s imaginable that if you cough all the way to the front component of the ship, you can get to the ventilation formula at the stern,” Hargrove said. “And Bangor’s submarines can’t fail. These are missions without fail. “
The USS Ohio had just 11 N95 ventilators when its outbreak began on March 28, according to documents received through Kitsap Sun. A few days later, on April 2, the team received two hundred expired surgical masks. The Ohio example showed that masking “likely helped slow the spread” of the virus and brought the need for this PPE to the list of legal medical assignments, pieces that are considered medically mandatory for implementation.
The ship’s sailors concentrated on a “cleanup of the entire ship” on March 28, with a momentary cleanup two days later. aerosols exhaled by an inflamed person.
But probably the most important decision was made by the USS Ohio to use the bubble strategy, according to the filing. All groups of cases gave the impression of being from docking areas. After the quarantine came into force, the ship’s sailors no longer suffered from “symptomatic groups”.
In the end, the Ohio outbreak was limited to just 12 sailors from a team of more than 130, according to the documents. Of these, two cases were severe enough to require local emergency rooms. A sailor developed a long COVID and did not resume his duties aboard the Ohio. By May 16, 2020, the virus had subsided aboard the submarine, the Navy’s presentation said.
Kline said sailors, especially enlisted and lower-ranking sailors, struggled to the fullest at the beginning of the pandemic. While older, more experienced sailors can return home to their families, “there’s no escape for our youth,” he said, adding public spaces to vent, such as outdoor recreational facilities.
“You’ve gotten used to hearing the upper control say ‘out of an abundance of caution,'” Kline said.
In one part of the world, the Navy faced the same problem. As the virus devastated Italy, the first Western country whose hospitals were temporarily overwhelmed, U. S. military leaders were temporarily overwhelmed. U. S. troops in Europe feared an impending crisis that could cripple their ability to keep ships at sea.
“We were seriously involved if this spread to southern Italy, we wouldn’t have hospital capacity to deal with it,” said Adm. Jamie Foggo, then Naples-founded commander of 35,000 sailors and staff founded in Europe and Africa in the spring. 2020. “Nobody in a position for that. “
Isolating sailors with health problems has become the most sensible priority, from “commanders to deck plates,” Foggo said. But how do you know who had COVID-19 and who didn’t?
The U. S. Military The U. S. had only one device capable of detecting COVID, commonly known today as the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method, for all of Europe and Africa. And it was located at a base in Germany.
Sending swabs too slowly. Foggo then ordered a Cold War-era aircraft, the two-propeller C-26, to carry samples to and from the base. His project is temporarily known as “express mucus,” Foggo said.
Tests conducted aboard Navy ships would be administered to pilots who kept a distance from those on board, a “safe physical separation,” he said.
The bubble had to be preserved at all costs.
“We just kept them at sea,” he said of the Navy ships, adding the aircraft carrier USS Harry Truman and its destroyer and cruiser strike organization. “And if they arrived at the port, we prefer not to bring anyone. “together. “
Foggo claimed that the strategy is complicated for everyone, but keeping military ships at sea is too important.
When the number of cases began to rise at home, it was only then that “America acquired religion” and more PCR testing machines began to arrive in Europe, Foggo said. The Navy honed its strategy, which it emulated later in 2020 in other industries. and professions around the world, from Hollywood movies to Major League Baseball.
“I think the military has led the way,” Foggo said. “There is no excuse for a shipment not to start. No one wanted to see (the explosion of the USS Theodore Roosevelt), certainly terrible. “
In April 2020, amid the spread of a virus, the Bremerton-based USS Nimitz had the unenviable task of being the first aircraft carrier to deploy after the pandemic began. The Navy may not be another marginalized aircraft carrier.
As in the USS Ohio, the leaders of the Nimitz deployed the bubble. Sailors stationed on the carrier remained quarantined for an entire month at the dock of the Kitsap-Bremerton Naval Base. Some 8,000 sailors from the Nimitz strike organization endured restrictions, testing and testing to put the ship at sea without COVID.
“It was draconian,” said Wooldridge, who has since retired as a naval doctor and entered personal practice at Bremerton. “But it worked. He kept the shipment at sea, the sailors ready. “
The bubble worked so well that there were no cases of COVID-19 aboard the Nimitz, its record deployment, Wooldridge said.
Wooldridge joined the team in September 2021. Flying to Bahrain, the headquarters of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet where the Nimitz sailed, he remained, like other team members, in a Conex box for two weeks, testing the virus twice. Here he came back negative, he boarded, where he spent seven more days in a enlisted dormitory that housed about 40 sailors for additional quarantine. And even after coming out of quarantine, he put on an N95 mask.
The shipment carried convalescent plasma, the best-known COVID remedy at the time, as well as a reinforced medical team that included an additional intensive care physician, an intensive care nurse, a tactile tracker, and a microbiologist for COVID testing. The shipment also had on board an additional psychologist for the intellectual aptitude and well-being of the sailors.
“That ended up being the trickiest position,” Wooldridge said.
Some sailors interviewed through kitsap Sun called the deployment a “prison-like” environment, with ports visiting brief stops to climb a pier to rest and relax.
But it wasn’t until the spring of 2021, after Nimitz returned home, that COVID-19 cases began to spread among the team, because, regardless, they were back in the general population, he noted.
Once the Navy had a vaccine to offer sailors in late 2020, the service began to remember the maximum serious quarantine measures. Wooldridge said that in 2021, the shipment began incorporating COVID-19 positive sailors, self-confident. then fully recover. The Nimitz is preparing for its next deployment in the coming months, and the nearly half-century-old shipment will be decommissioned in 2025.
Meanwhile, the USS Ohio resurfaced in the news when the Navy announced it had trained with Marine Corps expeditionary forces in February 2021 near the Japanese island of Okinawa. Among the first goals: to make sure the Marines can temporarily board the 560-foot-long submarine. The shipment is deployed to Guam, where it alternates with its sister shipment, the USS Michigan.
The USS Ohio returned home in December 2021, wearing a huge silver and black lei over her sail. The submarine, now the oldest in the U. S. fleet. In the U. S. , it is scheduled to be decommissioned in 2026.
To date, 17 Navy sailors have died from COVID-19.
Josh Farley covers the army for the Sun. Follow him on Twitter @joshfarley.
To see exit: