Until the 20th Century, more wartime combatants were killed by disease than by enemy forces. During my Army service in the ‘60s there was an epidemic of meningitis taking place among the trainees at Fort Ord. We were required to keep the barracks at a chilly 55 degrees because apparently that slowed the transmission.
There were not that many deaths, but the specter of a mass infection was a serious subject for the Army. Fortunately, the US military has “socialized medicine” that treats all patients.
All of the meningococci isolated were serotype B and about 50 per cent of the military patients with meningitis had sulfadiazine resistant strains. At this time, approximately 20 per cent of the civilian male population of military age are carriers of the organism before going into service. By eight weeks of training nearly 90 per cent of the men in some barracks carried the organism. Yet there was no correlation between the carrier rate and the occurrence of cases between barracks.
COVIC-19 is so much more serious and infectious than the strain of meningitis that “plagued” Fort Ord, but the meningitis threat still closed down basic training there during 1964 when 84 cases resulted in about a dozen deaths.
There is no way in our current medical climate to field a military force without infecting virtually every member of it. The United States is currently without the services of its Army.