BootsAndBeards

I would start by saying basic training is a natural petri dish for diseases. At reception you live in bays with 30 people, each person from a random part of the country. Then you are part of a company of several hundred people and spending most of the first week in massive lines surrounded by people. Then after the first week you get assigned to a real company and get scrambled with a new random set of 100-200 people, some of these are the same as from reception, not all, now living in bays with 60 people to a room. There was some regulation that you self quarantine for two weeks before shipping. I was never told, the day I shipped my recruiter handed me a piece of paper stating I had been quarantining and I just went along with it. I assume most people did the same.

We were supposed to be tested every 2-3 weeks, but when we came back from Christmas block leave they stopped testing anyone. When we asked the drills why our testing was suddenly canceled they said they didn't know but seemed annoyed by it. I can only assume the quarantine camps became full to capacity, they were already getting overloaded when I was in just before leave. Of course most people only lost their sense of taste and smell, maybe tiredness and a cough and the cold air started to sting their lungs, though I was asymptomatic. The whole thing was a joke really, in covid camp you wrote down your own temperature and symptoms each day, so you could write whatever you wanted to show you were healthy at the end of the two weeks.

This was still months before the vaccine, but we got all the regular shots. A lot of people in quarantine were picked up from reception, so not all of them had their shots yet. The guy who was hospitalized from quarantine was taken in about 2 weeks after the shoots, the guy who collapsed in the bathroom about 2 months later. We also heard the ambulance come to covid camp every few days to pick someone up, though I didn't personally know anyone else who was taken or how sick they actually were.