Coronavirus outbreak strikes Marine Corps recruit Depot at Paris Island

AP/Houston Chronicle:
A coronavirus outbreak has infected dozens of Marine recruits and staff members at the service's East Coast recruit training center, prompting the suspension of additional arrivals for the foreseeable future, defense officials said Monday.

The cases at Parris Island, South Carolina, emerged following a "wave in testing" over the weekend, a defense official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. One official said there are at least 20 positive cases, and another said there are believed to be a few dozen but fewer than 50.

The outbreak could mark the Defense Department's largest yet. Defense officials have said that dozens of sailors aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt have tested positive for the virus while on deployment in the Pacific, forcing a stop last week for treatment in Guam.

The Marine Corps acknowledged the suspension of new recruits arriving at Parris Island on Monday but did not detail how many cases have emerged following a Pentagon decision last week to not provide specific information about coronavirus cases from individual bases and units.

Marine officials said in a statement that the service is taking steps to "protect its recruits, recruit training personnel, their families and the communities where they live and serve by temporarily suspending the shipping of new recruits" to Parris Island.

"The preservation of our Marines, recruits and their families is the highest priority for Marine Corps Recruiting during this national emergency," Gen. David Berger, the service's commandant, said in a written statement. "With that in mind, we've paused this week's shipping of new recruits to Parris Island and will revise our overall shipping plan to ensure we are able to meet the Nation's needs while protecting its next generation of Marines."
...
Squad bays for recruits are not designed for "social distancing."  They can have 50 or more men in one room and the toilets and showers are not designed for privacy.  This virus will be a challenge for the military to deal with in many ways.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t...
Read more

Is the F-35 obsolete?

Headline USA: Pentagon Fires Back after Musk Calls Its Most Expensive Project ‘Obsolete’ 'Yeah, as I'm sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I'm not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35....'   ... ... Drones appear to be replacing jets for many operations.  The Russia-Ukraine war is an example of that.  Drones are often hard to detect and can be used for intelligence operations as well as for attacking enemy targets.  It would not surprise me to see drones engaging other drones in combat.  They also cost much less than manned fighters.  
Read more