Beaumont's new precautions in place as we continue to fight COVID-19

ROYAL OAK, Mich. (FOX 2) - As the state and nation fought the spread of COVID-19, hospitals took precautions to help contain the virus. Now that cases in Michigan are slowing down, they're starting to ease restrictions - but the next time you walk into a hospital, it's going to look a lot different.

Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak let us inside the doors where we noticed some major changes. Things like you see at any grocery store or restaurant - plexiglass partitions, floor markings for 6 feet distance, plus hand sanitation stations and more wide-open spaces.

"We really evaluated our systems from a patient standpoint. We all imagined ourselves being patients or families coming back to a place they were scared to come to," Dr. Jeffrey Ditkoff said. 

While cases are dropping in Michigan, we're still in of a pandemic so Dr. Ditkoff said they're separating the emergency room patients.

"We've separated our ER - yellow and blue, yellow for COVID and blue for non-COVID - put them through totally different processes not interacting at all basically like being in two separate emergency departments," he said.

Dr. Nick Gilpin said this was an extreme version of what they would normally do during a contagious disease. 

"I think it's gonna relax a bit, I don't know how much more permanence there's going to be. If you asked me if we would be wearing masks in the middle of June, 6 months ago I would have probably laughed, yet here we are," Dr. Gilpin said.

The safety measures weren't lost on Curtis Jordan. His wife, Stephanie, caught COVID-19 and spent more than a month on a ventilator. While she was recovering, doctors found a tumor on her heart. 

On Wednesday, it was successfully removed. 

"It's a very unpredictable thing. I've learned through the experience of this virus, this virus has brains. It attacks and chooses the weakest parts of a person and it destroys it," Jordan said.