WASHINGTON, DC – If you’ve served in the military you know one thing is true, you’re constantly herded like cattle and moved from place to place. There’s nothing wrong with that. Whenever you mass deploy troops to warzones…or empty capital cities, you have to move people quickly and in bulk. Now, as National Guard troops now come forward to say social distancing and quarantining guidelines were tossed out the window for their rapid deployment, the Wall Street Journal reports 200 of them are going home with a parting gift, COVID-19.
“Right after the holidays they packed us together like sardines in buses and rooms for this,” one Guardsman told Politico. “We did not get COVID tests on arrival.”
Now, after troops were packed together in tight quarters over the past week, COVID-19 is spreading among them.
“Already, hundreds of Guard members who poured into Washington, D.C., after the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol have tested positive for Covid-19 or are quarantining in nearby hotels, three Guard sources said. Guard leadership has declined to release an official number of positive cases, but troops and lawmakers alike worry that the deployment is becoming a superspreader event,” Politico wrote.
Now, Nancy Pelosi and the Biden administration are under fire from their own after troops were kicked out of the Capitol complex and banished to the garage, packed in like sardines with no social distancing.
“Ideally, these guys should all be in hotels. When they’re taking rest time, they should be taking it outside the campus with an ability to be separated and socially distanced,” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat Congressman from Connecticut said. “Ultimately we’ve got to make sure that they’re not taking their extended rest time on campus, that they’re in hotel rooms.”
Now with almost 200 confirmed positives, hundreds of other troops are being quarantined in D.C. for exposure to COVID-19.