As the COVID-19 outbreak onboard the US Navy aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt gets worse, its captain has penned a pleading letter to the Navy for enough resources to isolate his entire crew.
“Request all available resources to find NAVADMIN [Navy Personnel Command] and CDC [US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] compliant quarantine rooms for my entire crew as soon as possible,” Capt. Brett Crozier, commanding officer of the Roosevelt, wrote in a four-page letter on Monday addressed to the Department of the Navy.
“This will require a political solution but it is the right thing to do,” Crozier said in the letter, which was obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle and printed on Tuesday. “We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset – our sailors.”
Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress think tank and former Pentagon official, told the Chronicle that “it is very unusual” for a captain to pen such a letter, as “it shows that this is a person who is putting the welfare of his sailors ahead of his career.”
The huge warship pulled into Guam last week after several cases of COVID-19 were identified among the 5,000-member crew. Two weeks earlier – about the time the virus incubates in an infected person's body before they show symptoms – the vessel spent several days docked at the Vietnamese port of Da Nang, during which the…
