A Pella native works as an emergency room doctor in Detroit, Michigan, and is on the frontlines of fighting COVID-19. Dr. Marcus Haustein is a Pella High School graduate, and serves as a second-year emergency medicine resident at Ascension St. John Hospital. Haustein says he works in an emergency room with several cases of COVID-19, and has seen first-hand the devastating impact it can have on people of all ages, and has required intensive work to keep patients alive fighting the virus.

“Right now, our emergency department has been completely turned into a COVID unit, if you will,” he says. “We have basically all of our patients who are coming in, I would say 75 percent of them are showing signs or symptoms of having COVID-19, and we do stil have other patients coming in with chest pain, abdominal pain, and other things that are unrelated.”

“We’re doing things a lot differently, we have to prepare ourselves a lot differently that we would normally have to, and a lot these people are very sick–they take a lot of resources, a lot of our time as doctors, nurses, and techs, and obviously, it’s a whole different ballgame when you’re worried also about getting sick yourself.”

Haustein says some of the danger comes from the fact that there is no approved treatment or vaccine, which makes helping COVID-19 patients more resource-intensive.

“From my standpoint in the emergency department, all we can do is try to stabilize people as much as possible, usually when people come in, our main concern is their work of breathing and what their oxygen level is like,” he says. “The thing we worry about most is when the oxygen level is dropping and people are needing supplemental oxygen.”

Haustein says it comes in stark contrast to his hometown, where there are currently no positive tests of the novel coronavirus. He says the best way people can stay safe and help out their local medical professionals is to adhere to social distancing guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“I would say, based on what I’m seeing, it’s very important to be socially distancing,” he says. “I get that it’s very hard — we’ve been doing it here for about a few weeks already at this point, but you don’t necessarily know that you have the virus when you have it in the early stages–you don’t necessarily show any signs or feel the symptoms and you can have the virus and be passing it along to other people without having any idea, and that can be going on for up to two weeks.”

Hear more from Haustein about the fight doctors and medical professionals face against COVID-19 on today’s Let’s Talk Pella. Marcus and his wife Heidi (Vander Molen) are both Pella natives, with several family members living in the Pella area.