Brooklyn Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell was in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic in late March and early April.

He was a lead intensivist in the ICU at Maimonides Medical Center, but changed his role to work in the emergency room.

"It's a difficult thing to feel like something is not quite right,” he told News 12. “Usually with Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome and a very bad pneumonia, people suffer from respiratory fatigue."

But he says COVID-19 is a different animal.

"I was watching patients with extremely low oxygen level that were not tiring out. And that's what made the decision to put this breathing tube in, which as an intervention I knew was very risky -- it's what made that decision very, very difficult," Dr. Kyle-Sidell says.

The doctor says patients with ARDS normally have thick, heavy lungs which require not only oxygen, but pressure. But he says many COVID-19 lungs are *not thick or heavy” and therefore some of those patients should not automatically be thrown on a ventilator. 

Dr. Kyle-Sidell says there needs to be a personalized approach to each patient.