V E TE R AN S AFFAI R S & M I LITARY M E D I CI N E O UTLO O K
The U.S. military goes to war against the novel coronavirus. By Craig Collins
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t was in late February 2020 that the first American military service member, a young soldier stationed at Camp Carroll near Daegu, South Korea, was infected with the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, that causes the disease now known as COVID19. By then, the Department of Defense (DOD) had already been working, for weeks, on the effort to protect service members and all Americans, at home or overseas, from the unpredictable and often deadly virus that has made its way around the world. As the virus continued to sicken people in China, where the global pandemic began, the DOD’s earliest activities were directed at keeping military and civilian Americans safe. The federal officials, service members, and civilians evacuated from China in the early weeks of the pandemic, when many
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commercial flights had been grounded, were brought home on military aircraft, and many were temporarily housed at military bases. Civilian evacuees from China, or from passenger cruise ships that had suffered outbreaks at sea, were lodged at DOD facilities under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The U.S. military and its federal and international partners were called upon to do more as the pandemic spread across the globe, and the Global Pandemic Campaign Plan issued by the Pentagon on January 30 has grown in scope and complexity to reflect the challenge of fighting a pernicious enemy that attacks indiscriminately. The DOD’s response to the coronavirus has been truly global in scale and comprehensive in scope, tapping into military expertise in everything from logistics to medicine to vaccine development. Brian Lein, MD, joined the campaign in May 2020, as the Defense Health Agency’s new assistant director for health care administration. Before that, Lein spent 30 years in the Army, commanding some of the nation’s most important medical, research, and educational facilities before retiring with the rank of major general. “In just about every aspect of the nation’s COVID-19 response,” Lein said, “you see the fingerprints of the Department of Defense. It’s been at the forefront of a lot of what’s been done.”
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U.S. AIR NATIONAL GUARD PHOTO BY MASTER SGT. MATT HECHT
COMBATING COVID-19
U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer 2 Timothy Jardinico works in the New Jersey National Guard’s Joint Operations Center in the Homeland Security Center of Excellence, Lawrenceville, New Jersey, April 22, 2020. New Jersey soldiers and airmen, as well as active duty personnel and civilians from U.S. Northern Command, were working together in the center to support the state’s response efforts to COVID-19.
