On May 27, the day the number of confirmed deaths in the United States attributed to COVID-19 topped 100,000, the U.S. military posted an equally stunning statistic.
Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, of its 1.2 million active-duty troops, only one had succumbed to the deadly virus.
A single death within the entire active-duty force: Chief Petty Officer Charles Thacker Jr., 41, who contracted the disease while aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt.
Four months after the first confirmed case of COVID-19 was reported, the mortality rate for the U.S. military was 1 in 1.2 million.
Counting two deaths among the 783,000 additional members of the National Guard and Army Reserve, the rate is 3 out of almost 2 million, or 1 out of every 661,000.
If all 36 deaths in the Department of Defense are counted, including civilian workers, contractors, and dependents, a universe of well over 2.6 million people, the rate is still around 1 in 72,000.
During the same period, 1 in every 3,280 people in the U.S. perished from COVID-19 complications, more than 20 times the rate for the entire DOD workforce and workers’ families.
One reason for the disparity is obvious.
COVID-19 disproportionately affects people who are older and sicker, especially those above 75 or who have underlying conditions such as diabetes.
Members of the military, whether active or reserves, have to meet strict health and fitness standards, so they are by design younger, healthier, and better able to survive a coronavirus infection.
But that only partly accounts for the dramatic difference in outcomes, especially if you consider that the Pentagon’s comparative success did not require any major disruptions in worldwide operations.
“We’ve placed tough restrictions on our people — all to protect the force and all to preserve our mission readiness,” said Defense Secretary Mark Esper at a recent virtual town hall for DOD workers worldwide.
While many have questioned the efficacy of masks and have begun to consider social distancing guidelines excessive, the Pentagon has doubled down on safety measures that have proven demonstrably effective in slowing the spread of the virus.
Over the course of three weeks in March, as the threat of the COVID-19 became clear, Esper ordered that Pentagon workers maintain 6 feet of social distancing, allowed anyone who could to telecommute, issued a 60-day stop-movement order restricting travel, imposed self-isolation quarantines for anyone who had potentially been exposed to the virus or who was returning to the U.S., and mandated face coverings at all times for anyone who could not maintain social distancing while outside their homes.
“We’ve been very successful. Our numbers relative to the broader population, or relative to any other population, have been very good,” Esper said. “Tragic for those who have lost folks or who have been hospitalized, but those numbers are far, far lower because of the measures we’ve taken.”
The Pentagon has taken extraordinary steps to keep the U.S. missions worldwide on track while dealing with a virus-stricken aircraft carrier that was sidelined and pausing basic recruit training to adopt new safety protocols.
“There seems to be this narrative out there that we should just shut down the entire U.S. military and address the problem that way. That’s not feasible,” Esper said at a White House coronavirus task force briefing April 1.
“The world is a big world. There’s a lot of things out there that are not necessarily in the United States’s interests that happen every single day, from terrorists to Russia to China to Iran and North Korea and all kinds of other threats and challenges that are out there,” said Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, addressing the virtual town hall. “We have to operate within a COVID-19 environment.”
The sometimes onerous restrictions, especially a worldwide ban on travel, imposed real hardships on military families, many of whom have been frozen in place for months, unable to move to their next assignments or do simple things like sell their houses.
“It’s all about protecting our force, our people,” said Esper. “I know for some, it may seem like we’re being too cautious, and for other folks, it seems too risky.”
But Esper is warning that the new normal will be different, at least for a while, from the old normal — based on the lessons learned from the pandemic.
Late last month, Esper visited Parris Island to observe Marine Corps basic training under the new coronavirus guidelines.
“I noticed as they were going through the training, they were appropriately socially distanced when it made sense. And at all times, they wore face covering,” he said.
But what Esper found most interesting is that the measures designed to prevent the coronavirus’s spread were also preventing the spread of other respiratory tract infections.
“They’ve seen sick call go down remarkably across the board, and they’ve seen a higher number of recruits available for training day in and day out,” he said. “So there is good coming out of this, lessons learned, I think, that will make us even more effective and better well into the future.”
But the Pentagon is not ready to declare victory, and is bracing for a possible second wave of COVID-19 cases with the return of cool weather in the fall.
“We’re in a war, and sort of the secret weapon here is a vaccine,” said Milley. “So we need to continue taking care of our appropriate precautionary measures in terms of distance, hygiene, travel restrictions, and a wide variety of other things.”
The goal of Operation Warp Speed is to produce 300 million doses of an effective vaccine by Jan. 1.
“I’m confident we will be able to deliver vaccine at scale in time,” said Esper.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
