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Army Had 'Quarantined' Troops Mingle With Healthy Ones (Fort Bliss and Fort Hood)
https://www.thedailybeast.com/army-had-quarantined-troops-mingle-with-healthy-ones
After a nine-month deployment to the Middle East, military policemen from a Missouri National Guard company arrived at Ft. Bliss, Texas on Mar. 6 to demobilize and proceed home. They spent a week and a half moving freely around the sprawling base—until, hours before they were supposed to fly home, they were ordered into coronavirus quarantine.
It wasn’t just Ft. Bliss. A different National Guard unit returning from its own deployment entered quarantine at Ft. Hood, Texas on Sunday. But its quarantine didn’t seem to provide for social distancing. Pictures provided to The Daily Beast show soldiers from Ft. Hood—troops outside the quarantine and presumed to be uninfected—serving meals up close to those in the quarantine.
While the guardsmen question the point of their porous quarantines, the commands running those bases are scrambling to fix the problem. Both the initial disarray and the rapid corrections the bases are implementing are improvisational attempts at handling the wide-ranging disruption created by the novel coronavirus outbreak. Their collective experiences this week represent another inside indication into how the U.S. military is attempting to tackle a problem that it, like much of the country, did not anticipate dealing with.
The accounts and photographs in this story come from people familiar with what the quarantine looks like from the inside on condition of anonymity. After seeing reporting from The Daily Beast on alarming conditions within military quarantine for returning veterans, they are seeking to accelerate the military getting on top of a problem that is likely to intensify as more troops return from deployment and enter quarantine.
</snip>
After a nine-month deployment to the Middle East, military policemen from a Missouri National Guard company arrived at Ft. Bliss, Texas on Mar. 6 to demobilize and proceed home. They spent a week and a half moving freely around the sprawling base—until, hours before they were supposed to fly home, they were ordered into coronavirus quarantine.
It wasn’t just Ft. Bliss. A different National Guard unit returning from its own deployment entered quarantine at Ft. Hood, Texas on Sunday. But its quarantine didn’t seem to provide for social distancing. Pictures provided to The Daily Beast show soldiers from Ft. Hood—troops outside the quarantine and presumed to be uninfected—serving meals up close to those in the quarantine.
While the guardsmen question the point of their porous quarantines, the commands running those bases are scrambling to fix the problem. Both the initial disarray and the rapid corrections the bases are implementing are improvisational attempts at handling the wide-ranging disruption created by the novel coronavirus outbreak. Their collective experiences this week represent another inside indication into how the U.S. military is attempting to tackle a problem that it, like much of the country, did not anticipate dealing with.
The accounts and photographs in this story come from people familiar with what the quarantine looks like from the inside on condition of anonymity. After seeing reporting from The Daily Beast on alarming conditions within military quarantine for returning veterans, they are seeking to accelerate the military getting on top of a problem that is likely to intensify as more troops return from deployment and enter quarantine.
</snip>
