The Department of Defense reported its largest single-day increase in active-duty military members infected by the coronavirus, now at 174, while Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley held a virtual town hall at the Pentagon to respond to personnel questions.
The Defense Department reported 41 additional COVID-19 cases among the military, 15 more civilians, 26 more dependents, and four recovered contractors. The total number of DOD personnel infected by the virus is 321, up from 243 reported cases Monday.
“It is a time of great challenge as we face this global pandemic that is upon us,” Esper said before taking questions from service members across the globe alongside Milley and senior enlisted adviser to the chairman Ramon “CZ” Colon-Lopez.
“DOD is all-in on this,” Esper assured, noting that the Army was sending field hospitals to New York and Seattle this week, the Navy’s hospital ship USNS Mercy set sail with 1,128 military and civilian personnel for Los Angeles Monday, and researchers at Fort Detrick were working on vaccines and therapeutics.
Esper also reminded defense personnel that DOD was releasing surgical masks and ventilators from its strategic reserves for civilian use, but he warned that the Defense Department would face a shortage of personal protective equipment soon and scale back elective surgeries until private industry could replenish supplies.
Both Esper and Milley addressed how the virus was affecting mission readiness.
“It will become more challenging,” Esper said. “I’m very confident that we will maintain mission readiness.”
Milley said the cancellation of training and exercises would have a “moderate to low level of readiness impact.”
Esper said potential adversaries were “turning inward right now,” but misinformation was still proliferating and the DOD planned to add a “myth busters” page to its website to address some of what is circulating.
“We want to dispel bad rumors,” he said. “We probably have external actors, countries who want to sow chaos in the United States by injecting some of this into the ecosystem.”
Milley suggested that personnel with “flu-like symptoms,” such as a fever over 100 degrees, should get tested for the coronavirus.
“If you’re having those symptoms, you should get tested,” he said, without addressing an apparent shortfall in tests across the services.
Esper said DOD was still working on ensuring enough swabs, test kits, and lab capacity for processing. While the defense secretary has not explicitly said that DoD does not have enough test kits, Esper has, in recent days, indicated a slowness to reach all potentially infected personnel.
“It’s not perfect right now, we can do better,” he said Tuesday. “For the most part, we’ve been able to test people and get results back in a timely manner in most cases. In other places, we may be challenged in terms of timeliness, but that’s usually a function of distance and isolation.”
“That capability will ramp up over time,” he added, noting that self-tests will soon be available, and the Army is working on machines to more quickly process results in volume.
Milley meanwhile hedged when addressing a question about when a “stop movement” order will be lifted for a return to normalcy.
“You’re gonna be on freeze, hold for about 60 days, then we’ll reevaluate,” he said. “We’ll see, we don’t know yet.”
A DOD travel restriction stopped all service members and civilians and their families from official travel for 60 days, through May 11 with few exceptions granted for mission-essential, humanitarian, and high-duress cases.
As to when DOD will get through the crisis, Milley said 90-day models experienced by other countries, such as China and South Korea, could mean normalcy returning to the U.S. by late May, June, or July.
“Frankly, no one actually knows that,” he said. “That may or may not apply to the United States, we’ll see.”
