On March 22, about a week after the coronavirus slowed the sports world to a crawl, a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Pacific Ocean reported its first case of infection. Two weeks later, 150 sailors on the USS Teddy Roosevelt tested positive for the disease and one of those, a hospitalized chief petty officer, died from it. By early May, six weeks after the initial positive test, more than 1,150 sailors—roughly one-quarter of the Roosevelt’s crew—were infected with coronavirus in one of the largest close-quarter spreads in the global outbreak: an epidemic within a pandemic.
In an unsettling twist, many of those who tested positive experienced no symptoms.