Dr. David Zelinskas got the call Thursday night: be ready to go within 72 hours to help fight the coronavirus.
“We all kind of had the feeling it was a matter of time,” said Zelinskas, 37, who works at Tidewater Physicians Multispecialty Group and lives in Virginia Beach.
He’s part of the Navy’s Reserve Forces and was being called on for the first time since he left active duty in 2017.
Zelinskas is one of 190 reservists from Hampton Roads and among 500 medical professionals nationwide who are headed to New York to help alleviate its outsized impact from the pandemic. There are now more than 68,000 cases in the city.
“This enemy, this mission, is directly the fight for us medical professionals,” Zelinskas said Friday. “It’s our time to step up to the plate and serve.”
Nearly a quarter of all Navy reservists who have been activated in the battle against the virus are from Hampton Roads, according to Lt. Cmdr. Ben Tisdale, a spokesman for Navy Reserve Forces Command based in Norfolk. About 850 citizen-sailors total are engaged in the fight, he said in an email.
Almost all are being sent to New York. There, they will either help with acute emergency care efforts at the Javits Center, which has been turned into a temporary emergency facility, or at 11 hospitals throughout the city.
The Navy’s hospital ships Comfort and Mercy, in New York and Los Angeles, respectively, also received 225 of the reservists. Following pleas from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, President Donald Trump on Monday reversed course on the Comfort and approved it to treat COVID-19 patients.
Chief Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Rath Hoffman said at a Monday press conference that the preference is still for coronavirus patients to fill the Javits Center before taking them to the Comfort.
On Friday, while he was preparing to deploy, Zelinskas still wasn’t sure where he’d be going. He knew New York was a major possibility, though.
He said the Navy Reserve told the medical professionals to pack whatever books or medical supplies they might need to take care of patients. The estimate was to be prepared to be gone anywhere from two to six months.
It’s not the first time Zelinskas has gone away with the military. He deployed as a physician aboard the USS George H.W. Bush as it fought the Islamic State.
This time “we’re not dropping bombs on the bad guys,” he said, but it’s a similar mentality.
“The way it sounds it’s going to be an all hands on deck kind of thing,” he said. “The unknown is scary, but we’ve got a lot of talented people on the front lines. This will pass. We’ll get through it.”
Zelinskas said it’s been easier to explain to his two daughters, who are 6 and 8, why he’ll be away this time around. The virus has pervaded life for everyone, unlike a ship fighting halfway around the world.
“They have a better understanding of this, Daddy having to go help people with the virus.”
Katherine Hafner, 757-222-5208, katherine.hafner@pilotonline.com
