Most of the USS Theodore Roosevelt's crew is being removed from the aircraft carrier so it can be disinfected after several sailors tested positive for coronavirus, Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly said Tuesday.
“The key is to make sure that we can get a set of crew members that can man all those critical functions on the ship, make sure they’re clean, get them back on, clean the ship, and get the other crew members off,” Modly told CNN. "That’s the process we’re going through. It’s very methodical. We’re absolutely accelerating it as we go.”
The ship docked in Guam last week after the sailors became ill, and on Monday, Capt. Brett Crozier wrote the Navy a four-page letter asking for help.
“This will require a political solution but it is the right thing to do,” Crozier wrote, reports The San Francisco Chronicle. “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.”
Crozier said only a few of the infected sailors had been removed from the ship, while most remained onboard and official guidelines for quarantines and social distancing was impossible.
“Keeping over 4,000 young men and women on board the TR is an unnecessary risk and breaks faith with those Sailors entrusted to our care,” he wrote.
Modly said work had been going on for several days to get the sailors off the ship and into accommodations on Guam.
However, he added, that there were not enough beds there at this time, so the military is speaking with the island nation's government to determine if there is some hotel space or if tents can be put up.
According to Modly, testing was limited initially to about 200 sailors a day, but the numbers will go up as tests are sent elsewhere to be processed.
"In combat, we are willing to take certain risks that are not acceptable in peacetime," Crozier wrote. "However, we are not at war, and therefore cannot allow a single Sailor to perish as a result of this pandemic unnecessarily.”