A U.S. Navy report on the coronavirus outbreak aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt showed that commanding officers had considered individually isolating around 3,000 crew members, including more than 1,000 who later tested positive for the virus, at U.S. military bases in Japan.
The envisaged move surfaced in late March, when infections among the sailors were first confirmed. U.S. forces had prioritized plans to airlift crew members to Okinawa until deciding at the last minute to isolate them instead at private hotels in Guam, their next port of call.
The Okinawa plan was eventually abandoned due to concerns that moving crew to the southern island prefecture, which hosts about 70 percent of the total acreage exclusively used by U.S. military facilities in Japan, would complicate relations with the Japanese government, the report said.