Washington: With the increasing COVID-19 threat in Afghanistan which appears ill-equipped to tackle it, the US has decided to withdraw nearly 1,000 its contractors from that country, said a top Pentagon official.
“We just issued a memo that directs contracting officers to support a US Forces Afghanistan memo to redeploy at- risk contractor employees due to insufficient medical capability in-country,” said Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment.
“We project this number to be less than 1,000, but we are committed to taking care of them,” she said at a Pentagon briefing.
The nearly 1,000 to be withdrawn would come from the more than 10,500 US citizens among the more than 26,000 Defence Department contractors in Afghanistan, according to a US Central Command report in January.
Lord gave no timeline for the withdrawal and did not say how many contractors had tested positive for Coronavirus or shown symptoms, but the announcement follows the evacuation of three contractors from Afghanistan to Germany aboard an Air Force C-17 Globemaster III specially outfitted to isolate infectious patients.
“This marks the first operational use of the system that was developed for the 2014 Ebola crisis, but was never used until now,” Lord said.
She said the evacuations are part of continuing efforts by the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, US Transportation Command and the Air Force “to ensure that we can safely transport COVID-19 patients from overseas locations to the United States.”
In addition, “We are absolutely committed to the safety of the air crew and medical support staff during these missions,” Lord said.
According to Lord, the C-17 carried a Transport Isolation System, or TIS, originally developed in 2014 to transport Ebola patients but never used.
The TIS is a tent-like, infectious disease containment enclosure that allows patients to be treated aboard the aircraft while protecting aircrew members from exposure, according to Air Mobility Command (AMC).
Before the evacuations from Afghanistan were announced, the Air Force said in a release that AMC had developed a COVID-19 Patient Movement Plan.
In coordination with U.S. Transportation Command, “we’ve produced a detailed plan that guides our crews on how to safely and effectively move ill patients to a location where they can receive greater care, all while providing protection for our aircrew, medical personnel and aircraft,” Brig Gen Jimmy Canlas, 618th Air Operations Center Commander, said in an Air Force release.
The goal was to analyse how air travels through a cargo hold using specialised, traceable droplets, said Major Dave Sustello, AMC’s Test and Evaluation Squadron Operations Officer.
