Scratch one flat-top

Here come old flat top
He come grooving up slowly
He got joo joo eyeball
He one holy roller
He got hair down to his knee
Got to be a joker he just do what you please.

 

Typically sailors are young and in good shape, so you would hope their immune systems are strong enough to deal with the coronavirus.
But I wouldn't be casual about this. Aircraft carriers are ships, which are basically enclosed, close quartered floating cities. Outbreak aboard these vessels could be devastating. and could affect the lives of countless individuals, including family and friends.

I wish all these sailors the best, and say a prayer for our entire country and our military, home, abroad, and afloat, as we all deal with this very challenging, life threatening reality.

 

Bob Dixon would be amused that his clarion radio call would still be used the better part of 80 years after his squadron participated in the Battle of the Coral Sea - the first naval engagement in which major fleet units fought each other beyond visual range.
Apropos, since this battle was the bird farm's 'coming out' party, marking the beginning of the end of the Navy's 'gun club.'

I probably know people on The Stick...or more commonly..."Stick".....soon probably to be given a different nickname - BY THEM.
.....and they'll do what sailors on a sick ship do - which is deal with the problem!
My beloved Navy is not made of timid sailors and Marines.

Aircraft carriers are nucular powered....AND (have the capability to be) nucular armed.
They're equipped in an age where CBR (Chem, Bio, Rad) mitigation are built into the boat from the drawing board, including robust wash down abilities, enhanced compartmentalization, positive pressure zones, and much better than average decontamination and PPE gear.
They're getting sea pay, and some are getting flight-deck pay - probably the most hazardous service bonus including flight pay, and sub pay.
That's sorta how it works in an age where bio attacks and radiation leaks are thought about before they happen.

Stick has capabilities that Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher's Lexington never dreamed about.....but they share one strength.....
Those sailors are young, fit, tough, smart, AND they WANT TO BE THERE.

Otherwise?
A COD probably flies off the boat every day.

If Stick goes Tango-Uniform?
We have 10 otha bird farms.......

 

We do observe, at this point, that the virus seems to affect the young less severely than the old (and as a function pretty smoothly increasing with age, oddly enough, not something seeming to have particular thresholds).

From what I've read so far, it seems too early to say much about why that is, in particular whether it boils down to an immune system being "strong enough". It seems some bad outcomes are associated with an overly strong (cytokine storm) immune response.

Jair Bolsonaro is banking on his "history as an athlete" to claim that he "would feel nothing". DAS posted an article about an Olympic swimming champion, who felt something.

Looks like we need to hope and wish the best for the crews. We're operating on very incomplete knowledge.

 

Concur....testing the kids on Roosevelt will give a significant sampling and reveal if there are a lot more people that pop positive for this bug.....however (comma!) if I'm accurately informed it will not tell us if any of the sailors have antibodies....which will also provide a key piece of the morbidity puzzle.
Right now we're all still in the 'don't know what we don't know' phase of this battle and we're all being fire-hosed with data and brilliant insights - without waiting for all of the data to be developed.

Blind men and an elephant - Wikipedia

 

Absolutely.
I did not mean to convey anything BUT that message. I do use the same term....we HOPE.

 

The death rate is a very strongly increasing function of age, but the hospitalization rate seems to be much less so:



Severe Outcomes Among Patients with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) — United States, February 12–March 16, 2020 | MMWR

 

Could you please quit repeating the bogus "R" in this name? This is not a new avian or crow/raven virus.

COVID-19

 

The 5 thou test samples won't hurt.

 

USS Ronald Reagan is docked in Japan, two infected, and I've not read if that entire crew will be tested.

 

Interesting idea, compared to hospitals. These large military vessels have positive pressure because one wants to keep the bad stuff on the outside. Hospitals, the opposite.

 

Firing the USS Theodore Roosevelt's Commander Exposes the Military's Deep Culture of Secrecy Even in a Pandemic

Well.....I suppose that's why they call it 'Fake News.'

Roosevelt's docked at Guam the day this thread was started.
At that time most of the squids were not able to leave the ship - which is understandable for the same reason that people aboard cruise ships were told that they had to stay aboard.
Sometime between then and yesterday a letter "leaked" and the civilian leadership lost confidence in the skipper and he was MacArthured.

I remember when I heard a quote from Captain Crozier's letter on CNN thinking....."Welp.....HE ain't gonna make flag!!"(Admiral)

All of that is what it is.
I'm not sure what "secrecy" is involved, since we were all accurately informed that they were docked in Quam and looking to accommodate all but a skeletal crew on the island PERHAPS without posing a risk to to the residents.
I AM SURE that if I wrote a similarly worded letter openly disagreeing with my parent company's handling of our Corona-virus response then I would receive similar treatment.
Probably without sympathy stories from MSM.....
I'm filling an "essential" job and at least one co-worker in my turf has tested positive and another is on leave with a quarantined daughter.....and I was in at least one of the affected offices...so even though our situations are dissimilar.......I can somewhat relate.

Those squids cashed their paychecks.
They get sea pay.
"Sick" ships are nothing new - and people I know on their side of the wire inform me that they're doing what they can.
(Apra Harbor, the Navy Hospital, and Andersen Ari base are not co-located)

The head-shed didn't fire Stick's skipper because he had a disagreement with his boss, but rather that he aired an open letter giving voice to that disagreement.......and by the way, the letter didn't sound like it came from a combat tested Hornet driver....IF you know what I mean.
If a Coronavirus positive ship docked in YOUR town and they just threw the brow over and let the passengers disembark - what would YOUR reaction be??
(hint....)
Most cruise ships are not Nucular powered nor do they have the "capability" of deploying nucular weapons.

YMMV.....

 

Read Catch-22.

War is hell.

There is a stark difference between being a good leader and being popular, and I think that the US Navy has a higher duty to the citizens of Guam and the rest of the United States FIRST.
Maybe my experiences having been extended on station because our sister boat went Tango-Uniform provides me with a different perspective.
While Roosevelt is welded to the pier, somebody else is gonna have to tote their load.

It’s not the skipper’s fault that they visited a commie nation 15 days before a first case cropped up...because the virus may have come aboard by air.
It IS the skippers fault that his 4-page letter leaked.....which is why he got fired.


I’m good with that.

YMMV

 

What does it mean when the communication path from aircraft carrier captain to Secretary of the Navy is faster through an unauthorized leak to the San Francisco Chronicle than through official chain of command?

 

Unlike many people in America....they're still on the job.
Still getting paid.
The things about carriers?
They almost never go anywhere alone.

When Doug was on his game, he was brilliant!
When he efffed-up he did that big too.
If you tell your bosses that they are not doing it right....publicly....that's the same as challenging them.

It's not.
Not even during a crisis.
ESPECIALLY not during a crisis.

What it MEANS is that Stick's skipper used the wrong communications path.

It's a fundamental principle in the military that there are open lines of communications all the way up the chain of command....but you have to at least inform your boss (time permitting) and their bosses that there's a situation that you need to take up the food chain.
If the skipper and the Strike Group commander are at odds over a life and death situation - he could have gotten a theater commander on the phone in under a minute.
There are other communications methods that go even higher and in LESS than a minute.....

CVNs have fabulous communications capabilities.
The skipper's letter didn't "leak"
He signed and published it.

Stern Shot:
Somebody needs to have a conversation with the new skipper and the Command Master-chief as well.
Those poor scared sailors were packed elbow to butt-hole on the hangar deck in the made-for-TV departure.
It looked less like a warship attending to a crisis and more like some of the recent spring break pictures I've seen from Florida recently.

Not exactly social distancing.
If I were the governor of Guam, I'd consider calling up the National Guard and closing Apra harbor......from the outside.

...at least until the squids get their poop in a group.

 

Everything I've seen indicates that it was sent to Navy brass, upstream from him. Not out to the general public or press.

"In a press conference on Thursday, Modly said that the first time he read the letter was in the San Francisco Chronicle, remarking that it was Crozier’s “hometown newspaper,” though he said he had no information indicating that Crozier leaked the memo."