747s Carrying Americans Exposed To Coronavirus Used New Quarantine Box For Infected Flyers
A pair of Kalitta Air 747-400ERF freighters carrying hundreds of U.S. citizens home from Japan after weeks of being quarantined on-board the cruise ship Diamond Princess, where 454 passengers contracted the COVID-19 novel coronavirus, have arrived at two American military bases. Pictures from the operation show that at least one of the aircraft was carrying a specialized shipping container-sized bio-containment system to isolate individuals diagnosed with the virus from non-infected passengers and crew. The late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen helped develop this system after the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
The two
aircraft left Tokyo's Haneda
Airport at 7:05 AM local time on Feb. 17, 2020. Due to crossing
the International Date Line, the first of these planes touched down at
Travis Air Force Base in California at just shy of 11:30 PM local time on Feb.
16. The second 747 arrived at
Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in Texas at 3:56 AM local time on Feb. 17.
"During
the evacuation process, after passengers had disembarked the ship and initiated
transport to the airport, U.S. officials received notice that 14 passengers,
who had been tested 2-3 days earlier, had tested positive for COVID-19,"
the U.S. State Department, which had chartered the flights, said in a statement on
Feb. 17, 2020, using the formal name for the new coronavirus. "These
individuals were moved in the most expeditious and safe manner to a specialized
containment area on the evacuation aircraft to isolate them in accordance with
standard protocols."
The press
release did not offer any details about this "specialized containment
area," but pictures from the evacuation show a Containerized
Bio-Containment System (CBCS) installed on one of the aircraft. The 747-400ERFs are not configured to carry
passengers by default and those that had not tested positive for the new
coronavirus traveled in palletized seating installed on the planes' cargo
floors.
Photos
of the flights evacuating US citizens from the quarantined Diamond Princess.
Kalitta Air 747 freighters with palletised seating, divided into compartments.
USAF bases (Lackland & Travis) being used as reception airfields.
The
CBCS is 44 feet long and eight feet tall, making it roughly the same size as an
ISO shipping container. It is "a first-of-its-kind, flyable medical
transport unit with full biocontainment," MRIGlobal,
which helped design the system, says on its website.
"The
units feature three rooms: a patient treatment area for four patients and four
caregivers; an ante room to safely don and doff personal protective equipment;
and a rest area for two caregivers," MRIGobal's page
continues. "Pilots can cargo the CBCS in both private and
military aircraft, confident that the biocontainment is safe and effective.
CBCS units can be moved by truck, too, ready for use. The CBCS is designed to
survive crash loads and rapid decompression per DOD Safe-to-Fly standards, and
the entire system can be rapidly de-contaminated and put right back into
service."
MRI GLOBAL
A 3D rendering showing the layout of
the CBCS.
PHOENIX AIR
A view from inside the CBCS during a
training exercise.
USAF
Another interior view.
The
development of the system began in 2014 with a $5 million public-private
partnership grant from the State Department to the Paul G. Allen Family
Foundation. At the time, Paul Allen,
a Microsoft co-founder who passed away in 2018 due to cancer, had expressed an
interest to the U.S. government in using some of his considerable wealth in
helping to combat the Ebola virus. In December 2013, an Ebola outbreak in
West Africa turned into a major regional crisis. This, in turn, prompted the
United States to deploy considerable resources, including a U.S. military task
force, to safeguard American citizens and help contain the epidemic.
That outbreak demonstrated the value
of a smaller system, known as the Aeromedical Biological Containment System
(ABCS). The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), together
with the U.S. military and air services contractor Phoenix Air, had developed
the ABCS between 2007 and 2010 in response to a number of serious disease
outbreaks, including multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, severe acute
respiratory syndrome (SARS), and avian influenza, or "bird flu."
The
ABCS, which was designed to fit inside Phoenix's Gulfstream III business jet
aircraft, consists of a tent-like isolator unit that is entirely sealed to
prevent airborne pathogens from escaping. You can read much more about the
development of ABCS and Phoenix Air's specially outfitted Gulfstreams here.
Between 2014 and 2015, Phoenix Air's
ABCS-equipped Gulfstream IIIs successfully brought 41 Ebola-infected patients
to hospitals in the United States and Europe. So, when Paul Allen had offered
to help, the State Department asked if he would be willing to help fund work on
a larger, more capable containment system that could be employed in response to
any future epidemic.
The Paul Allen Foundation, together
with MRIGlobal and Phoenix Air, set to work and the first examples of the new
Containerized Bio-Containment Systems (CBCS) were ready for testing in 2016.
MRIGlobal says that it took just 191 days in total, after the requirements were
solidified, to design and build the two CBCS.
The
CBCS requires a much larger aircraft than the Gulfstream III to carry it.
Kalitta's 747s are one option, but the State Department has also worked
with the U.S. Air Force to
certify its C-17A Globemaster III
airlifters to carry them, if necessary.
USAF
Phoenix
Air is the primary contractor responsible for sustaining the CBCS. At least as
of 2018, the company stood on-call to transport the
containers by truck to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International
Airport, where personnel would load them onto an aircraft, such as one of
Kalitta's 747s. Hartsfield-Jackson is situated some 40 miles southeast of
Cartersville Airport, where Phoenix Air is headquartered, but it is too small
to readily accommodate commercial aircraft large enough to carry the
containerized system.
"Training
exercises are conducted several times annually, flying multiple aircraft to
Africa, to maintain the high level of skills required to perform these
missions," according to Phoenix
Air. "The Contagious Disease program is operated under a
multi-year contract with the U.S. Department of State (DOS)."
US DEPARTMENT OF STATE
A low-quality image the US State
Department released in 2016 of a Kalitta Air 747 carrying an CBCS in Monrovia,
Liberia, during an Exercise called Tranquil Surge.
It's not immediately clear if the
State Department has access to more than two of these systems now. With each
one only able to hold four patients, one or two of them would not have been
enough to isolate all 14 of the U.S. citizens on the flights out of Japan who
had tested positive for COVID-19. The CBCS may have simply been installed to
provide an area to safely transport anyone who began experiencing especially
severe symptoms in flight. The pictures from on-board the 747s show that the
crew was wearing protective suits and it seems almost certain that other
precautions were taken to prevent the spread of the virus.
"Passengers
that develop symptoms in flight and those with positive test results will
remain isolated on the flights and will be transported to an appropriate
location for continued isolation and care," the State Department had said in its statement.
"Upon landing in the United States, passengers will deplane at either
Travis AFB or Joint Base San Antonio and will remain under quarantine for 14
days."
A total
of around 340 Americans left
Japan on both flights. Around 400 Americans had been on-board Diamond
Cruises' Diamond
Princess when it arrived in Yokohama
harbor some two weeks ago. Japanese authorities placed the ship under
quarantine after learning that a passenger who had disembarked in Hong Kong had
tested positive for COVID-19. At least 46 U.S. citizens on the ship have
already contracted the coronavirus since then.
At the time of writing, the CDC says
that there are 15 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States, not
including those from the Diamond
Princess, and that 60 additional
individuals are being evaluated for possible infection with the virus. There
have been no deaths confirmed to be linked to this new coronavirus in the
United States to date.
@CDCgov has
listed 467 people in 42 states in the US under investigation for the novel
coronavirus. Of them, 15 have tested positive, 392 negative, and 60 are still
pending. This doesn’t include those evacuated from the Diamond Princess cruise
ship.
As of
Feb. 16, 2020, the United Nations' World Health Organization reported that
there were nearly 51,900 confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide and 683 fatalities.
The vast majority of these cases and deaths have occurred inside China, where
the virus first appeared in December 2019. There have only been three deaths
outside of China, one in the Philippines, one in Japan, and one in France.
Though COVID-19's spread outside of China has been significantly slower than
inside that country, it has now appeared in 25 other nations around the
world.
WHO
The
U.S. State Department already helped diplomatic staff and other U.S.
citizens evacuate China on
chartered flights, including on Kalitta's 747s, but it is unclear if the
containerized containment system was employed or otherwise available on any of
those earlier flights.
If there is a need to help Americans
leave other countries where the virus becomes a major concern, it is certainly
possible that the State Department will charter additional flights, some of
which may be carrying the highly specialized Containerized Bio-Containment
System in case there is a need to isolate infected passengers.
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