A week into its deployment in New York City, a crew member abroad the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort has tested positive for COVID-19, Politico reports, and is in isolation.
This is not unexpected or surprising, and given that the Comfort was until last Friday not even taking pandemic patients, only other patients in an effort to relieve overwhelmed local hospitals, it seems possible or even likely that the crew member came aboard with the virus before the ship deployed. But it is another reminder that even highly trained professionals who know proper safety precautions are, despite those precautions, becoming infected themselves in large numbers.
On a more controversial note, it also may be a reminder of the limited usefulness of ship-based medical care for, of all things, an infectious disease outbreak. The rapid spread of the virus on the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt is due to the inherently crowded conditions on any large-crew vessel. The Comfort was not originally slated to take pandemic patients in New York because of the relative inability to isolate those patients, a decision that was overridden amid local fury when the 1,000 bed ship had, as of last Thursday, only 20 total patients.
We can only wait to see whether the infected crew member's condition was caught in time to avoid further crew contamination, but it is a certainty that the Comfort's crew, like all other healthcare heroes working to save American lives in the pandemic, are knowingly risking their own health and safety to care for the rest of us.