The Military's Secret to Fighting COVID-19[84]
[]"A newscaster report that the Pentagon had announced a seventh member of the military had died from the COVID-19 virus."
Are you properly stunned? 7 deaths out of 1.3 million members.
The Secret?...is that you didn't know.
Are you properly stunned? 7 deaths out of 1.3 million members.
The Secret?...is that you didn't know.
This is not mentioned in the article but most of us have heard the Military Docs and the VA state that they dispense millions of doses it's members.
You hit the nail on the head, Jeff.
Even at 1:1000, I would rather roll the dice than behave like a terrified prey animal.
This whole thing is carried on to undermine the present administration. The nonsense is beyond belief. The herd mentality of so many people is pathetic.
Any compromise will encourage the "professional" politicians and bureaucrats that we don't really care about our liberty.
Unfortunately we are a minority.
The majority would rather have a nice safe cell and be given a constant diet of reliably tasteless gruel.
What we need to be fighting now is the lockdown, where there still is one, and the emergency powers that enable misguided governors and mayors to do this to us whenever they want. In particular, the fact that every business in the country depends on keeping a license that officials can revoke whenever they feel like it. That has to change and it has to change permanently.
But here in California we can't even start to legally challenge it yet, since state elections offices are closed and so are courts.
Hooray for the military getting it right, of course, liberal state governors and city mayors either don't know this or ignore this info for the sake of scaring and controlling their citizens.
"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.”