How to Protect Troops from Coronavirus

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The US Defense Department wants to balance the need to protect troops from the coronavirus while maintaining their readiness to fight. The challenge is the easy opportunity for the virus to wreak havoc among Army troops — combat arms units, like infantry battalions, and basic training environments in which recruits live and eat in close quarters. 

The Army can’t wait a year until there’s a vaccine, so it is working on plans to continue training large groups of troops amid the escalating coronavirus pandemic by creating “safety bubbles” around groups of healthy soldiers. Entire companies and battalions could be isolated in the field for a month.

The idea is to test an entire company or battalion of soldiers, and if none have COVID-19, send them into the field for a month with prepackaged meals to do the kind of collective training exercises that social distancing guidelines have made risky on military bases throughout the United States. 

“We’re going to look at how big the size of a cohort can be. This is all brand new for us,” Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said. 

The key to the Army’s plan is pushing more coronavirus testing kits out into the field, McCarthy said. 

The Army has already tested an early pilot model of the “safety bubble” concept. Some 800 soldiers were recently taken in 32 sterilized buses from Basic Combat training in South Carolina to bases in Virginia, Oklahoma, and Texas. The soldiers were screened for COVID-19 symptoms, but not tested for the coronavirus.