About two dozen U.S. Navy sailors on the USS Milwaukee, or roughly 25% of the fully-vaccinated crew, have tested positive for coronavirus, reported the Associated Press on Monday.
The number is roughly equivalent proportionally to the number of crew who tested positive for the virus during an outbreak on the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in the spring of 2020.
In the Theodore Roosevelt outbreak, 1,271 crew members tested positive for the coronavirus out of a crew of 4,800 — about 26%.
The Theodore Roosevelt outbreak occurred at a time when coronavirus vaccines were not yet available. But according to the Navy, all crew members aboard the Milwaukee were fully immunized, or vaccinated.
The Milwaukee outbreak comes months after the Navy gave notice of a requirement that every sailor without an approved exemption would have to be vaccinated, or else be separated from the Navy.
In both cases, the outbreak led to a delay in schedules. The Navy is holding the Milwaukee at Guantanamo Bay, where it was conducting a port visit after leaving Mayport, Florida, on December 15 on its way to a deployment in the 4th Fleet, or U.S. Southern Command, area of operation to fight drug trafficking in the Caribbean.
Anonymous U.S. officials told the AP that “the Navy believes the total vaccination of the crew is the key factor in controlling the outbreak.”
One sailor died during the Theodore Roosevelt outbreak. So far, none of the sailors on the Milwaukee have needed hospitalization, the New York Times reported on December 26. However, a Guantanamo Bay base hospital spokesman told the newspaper that its medical and public health teams are in “close contact with medical” on the ship.
The AP also revealed that there was an outbreak on another ship earlier this year — with an even higher percentage of fully-vaccinated sailors testing positive for the virus.
Navy spokesman Cmdr. Sean Robertson told AP that the destroyer USS Halsey had to delay a homeport move from Pearl Harbor to San Diego after a significant number of its 300-member fully-vaccinated crew tested positive in early December. An anonymous Navy official revealed to AP that roughly a third of the crew had tested positive.
Robertson said that “most” had only mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. He said no sailor had been taken to the hospital, and vaccine booster shots were made available.
The Navy has touted the 98% vaccination rate of its force.
As of Dec. 22, 2021, the Navy said that 5,361 active component sailors remain unvaccinated, with only several hundred of those medically or administratively exempt.
The service recently fired a senior naval officer after he declined to be vaccinated and reportedly refused to be tested while waiting on a final response to his exemption request.
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