Guam Governor Leon Guerrero said Thursday that she decided to allow sailors from the USS Theodore Roosevelt to leave the military base and be quarantined in hotels on the island after the Navy asked for help to deal with the spread of COVID-19 on the aircraft carrier.
The U.S. Pacific Fleet assured that only sailors who tested negative for COVID-19 would be arranged to be quarantined in the hotels and the Navy would deal with any sailor in quarantine who tests positive individually, Guerrero said.
"They cannot go out of their rooms. They cannot go out to the lobby areas. They can't go to the beaches. The Navy is going to place security guards on the floors. They're going to have roving security and have leadership stay with them," she said at the daily online briefing.
The Navy asked local authorities to help them "get over this god-awful virus," she said, noting that her decision was made based on plenty of discussions and information and she had the "morale obligation, as an ethical action" to do so.
On Wednesday, the governor and Joint Region Marianas announced that they had reached an agreement to house sailors who tested negative off the base and would be sent to a designated hotel for a 14-day quarantine where they would have no interaction with the local community and be strictly monitored.
The aircraft carrier pulled into port in Guam on Friday, after several of its sailors had tested positive for COVID-19 and had been airlifted to the Naval Hospital on Guam.
The nuclear-powered Roosevelt has a crew of some 5,500 service members, among whom about 20 are originally from Guam. The ship left its San Diego homeport in California in mid-January for a regularly-scheduled deployment to the Indo-Pacific.
