Five sailors on the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt appear to have contracted the coronavirus for a second time and have been taken off the ship. The carrier is currently tied up in Guam after an outbreak of the virus infected over 1,100 sailors or almost a quarter of the ship’s crew.
Time reports that all five sailors had previously tested positive and had gone through at least two weeks of isolation. As part of the process, they all had to test negative twice in a row, with the tests separated by at least a day or two before they were allowed to return to the ship.
“These five Sailors developed influenza-like illness symptoms and did the right thing reporting to medical for evaluation,” the Navy said, adding that they were immediately removed from the ship and put back in isolation. A small number of other sailors who were in contact with them were also taken off the ship.
The Roosevelt has been in port at Guam since late March after the outbreak of the virus began on the ship. More than 4,000 of the 4,800 crew members have been housed ashore since then for quarantine or isolation. Earlier this month hundreds of sailors began returning to the ship, in coordinated waves, to get ready to set sail again.
As of Thursday, more than 2,900 sailors have re-boarded the ship, and about 25% of the more than 1,100 who had tested positive have now recovered, according to the Navy.
What does the apparent recurrence of the virus mean? It is difficult to tell. The immune response to the coronavirus is not well understood. In March, more than 140 coronavirus survivors retested positive for the disease in South Korea. After subsequent analysis, however, scientists blamed the nature of the testing itself for the results. There is no clear consensus thas to whether surviving the virus imparts immunity, although it does seem likely.
The five symptomatic sailors on the Roosevelt raise new concerns about immunity. It is also possible that problems with testing resulted in false-negative results in previous tests. Either alternative is worrisome as the carrier prepares to go to sea.
Thanks to Miro Antic for contributing to this post.
Frustrating feature of exigency: we have to work with imperfect information.
One of the reverberating features of this overall event is the impact of “little” statistics. Here w/Roosevelt “only” a small handful of failed tests (assuming that’s what we’re seeing) can mushroom into a large problem. Along the same lines, “only” 1:1000 kids appear to be affected by the syndrome similar to “Kawasaki syndrome,” but uh-oh: there are 74 million kids under 18 in the US alone.