US Navy pauses deployment of warship due to COVID-19 outbreak

The deployment of a US Navy destroyer to South America has been halted due to a coronavirus pandemic, the Navy announced on Friday.

The litorral combat cruiser USS Milwaukee is now docked at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, where it had halted for a planned port call. On December 15, it embarked on deployment from Mayport to the US Southern Command zone.

The Navy said in a statement that the ship’s personnel is 100% immunised and everyone who tested positive for COVID-19 has been quarantined by the rest of the crew. The number of crew members that tested positive was not revealed.

According to the Navy, a part of those infected are experiencing moderate symptoms and the specific variety is still unknown. As a result of the extremely infectious omicron form, COVID-19 infections have exploded across the country. ‘The ship is following an aggressive mitigation strategy in accordance with Navy and CDC guidelines’, the Navy said.

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The first major military outbreak of the virus occurred on the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier operating in the Pacific, early last year. More than 1,000 of the 4,800 crew members tested positive after the Roosevelt was grounded in Guam for over two months. One sailor died, and the whole crew was quarantined for weeks in a rotating system that kept enough sailors on board to keep the ship safe and operational.

More than 98% of all active-duty sailors have been properly vaccinated, as per the most recent data of the Navy.