The USS Kidd, currently fighting a COVID-19 outbreak on board, could have picked up the virus during counter-narcotics operations, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said during a Pentagon press briefing on Tuesday.
"A theory is that they could have picked it up on a counter-drug mission, where they pulled over a vessel possibly carrying drugs, and they board the vessel and may have come in contact with somebody carrying the virus there," Esper said during the briefing.
That theory, he said, is about all the information we should expect to get.
"That's all there is to that story," Esper said.
Similarly, the Pentagon recently put limitations on the amount of information it will release regarding ongoing outbreaks onboard Navy vessels.
Navy says no more USS TR, USS Kidd COVID-19 updates
According to Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman, the Defense Department wanted to move away from the pattern of "providing a daily tracker of minor changes." The policy shift is similar to a force-wide directive put in place by Secretary of Defense Mark Esper at the end of March.
“I’m not going to get into a habit where we start providing numbers across all the commands and we come to a point six, seven weeks from now where we have some concerns in some locations and reveal information that could put people at risk,” Esper said.
Now, Hoffman has shared similar comments regarding future limitations on the Navy's data.
"If there was, unfortunately, an additional outbreak, we would provide information," Hoffman said at a Pentagon press briefing on Friday. "But we wanted to get out of the pattern of providing a daily tracker of minor changes in this. And I think that's a reasonable place to be."
Meanwhile, the outbreak on the USS Kidd has surpassed the USS Theodore Roosevelt's infection rate. While only 24 percent of the USS TR's crew tested positive for COVID-19, about 30 percent of the USS Kidd's much smaller crew had tested positive with 95 confirmed cases as of the Navy's last release. Within six days of reporting its very first COVID-19 case, the virus had been identified in 64 additional sailors.
The USS Kidd returned to port in San Diego shortly after the first case was identified and testing is ongoing. Hoffman said that "lessons learned" from other cases were being applied in the USS Kidd's outbreak response.
"The important thing is that the ship is back in port, and the sailors are being taken care of and all of the proper protocols are being followed to make sure that we get her back to sea as soon as possible," Esper said Tuesday.
The Navy has outpaced all other branches of the military with positive COVID-19 cases since the DoD began releasing numbers, more than doubling the number of positive cases identified within the branch with the second-highest infection numbers.
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