CARRBORO, N.C. -- Michael Bury recently returned from treating COVID-19 patients in the country's epicenter.

Bury, 36, serves as a Lieutenant Nursing Corps Officer for the United States Navy Reserve. He's also a registered nurse, a clinical professor at the UNC School of Nursing, and co-owner of the Carrboro Family Pharmacy with his wife.

The military deployed him to New York City in early April for a two-month stint. 

"I was excited. I'd been wanting to go." he says.

Bury spent the time treating the sickest of patients at a Queens hospital 

"Everybody was coming there because that was the local hospital. So it was pretty much COVID all the time and a lot of respiratory failure," he adds.

He says it was tough to see patients without their families.

"It was just unusual to not see families there with the patients. Especially as sick as they were, and it was sad,"

He also felt that New Yorkers were very grateful. He has a message for North Carolinians still not taking the virus seriously. 

"But this virus does not know color. It doesn't know politics. All it knows is death and that death is real and there are things that we can do to prevent people from dying," he says.