Petty Officer 2nd Class Nathan D. Huff Bishop, 33, died Tuesday, Dec. 2. He is the 13th service member and second sailor to die from the coronavirus. (Facebook)
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WASHINGTON — An Ohio Navy reservist has died from complications related to the coronavirus, the 13th service member and second sailor to die from the virus, the Navy announced Thursday.
Petty Officer 2nd Class Nathan D. Huff Bishop, 33, died Tuesday at a local hospital in Canton, according to Cmdr. Ben Tisdale, a spokesman for the Navy Reserve. At the time of Bishop’s death, he was a Navy builder assigned to Navy Operational Support Center in Akron. His death was not recorded in the Pentagon’s coronavirus case chart that was updated Wednesday.
Bishop is the second sailor to die of the virus since the pandemic began in March. The other was Chief Petty Officer Charles Robert Thacker Jr., 41, an active-duty aviation ordnanceman from the USS Theodore Roosevelt who died April 13 at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Guam.
Bishop was a native of Ashland, Ohio, who graduated from basic training December 2005 and moved to the Navy Reserve in 2007, according to his biography provided by Tisdale. He deployed to the Middle East from March 2010 to July 2011 in support of Operations New Dawn in Iraq and Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan with Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 26.
His awards include the Army Achievement Medal, the Armed Forces Reserve Medal with Bronze ‘M’, and the Naval Reserve Meritorious Service Medal with Bronze Star, according to his biography.
As of Wednesday, the military reported 80,592 total cases of the coronavirus, according to the Pentagon’s coronavirus case chart. The Navy has the second highest number of total cases among the services at 17,035 cases. The Army has the highest number of total cases at 29,094. The Marine Corps has had 9,749 cases, the Air Force has had 14,547 cases and the National Guard has had 9,601 cases, according to the Pentagon.
On Thursday, the United States nears 14 million cases as the country waits for the Food and Drug Administration to approve the emergency use authorization for the coronavirus vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. There were at least 2,804 new deaths and more than 200,000 new cases reported in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins University. Since the pandemic started, 273,920 Americans have died from the virus.
