Sign up for our special edition newsletter to get a daily update on the coronavirus pandemic.

An ER doctor and two-time cancer survivor has died in his husband’s arms in their Harlem apartment — just days after he started to notice coronavirus symptoms, the grieving man told The Post on Wednesday.

“He was an amazing doctor. He loved to take care of people. He was an angel,” Arnold Vargas, 28, said about his husband, Dr. Frank Gabrin, 60, an ER physician at East Orange General Hospital in New Jersey who died Tuesdsay.

“Yesterday morning he just told me, ‘I can’t breath,’” Vargas said tearfully in a phone interview from his Harlem apartment. “I tried to do everything to save him. He died in my arms.”

A longtime friend told The Post that Gabrin told her he thought he caught the deadly bug from having to use the same face mask for an entire week.

“He had one medical kit — including the face mask — for a whole week,” creative strategist Debra Vasalech Lyons, 55, said.

“He had one pair of gloves. They ran out of the large and extra-large gloves and Frank had to try to wear a size medium. Every time he put them on they ripped. They ran out of soap,” she said.

“When he got sick he told me, ‘I know exactly when I got sick. It’s when I had to reuse my mask,'” added Lyons, who said Gabrin also worked at St. John’s Hospital in Queens.

Gabrin, who began experiencing chest pain and other symptoms on March 25, woke up Tuesday complaining that he couldn’t breathe, Vargas said.

As his condition deteriorated, Vargas said he called the NYPD about 10:30 a.m. and was transferred to another department. By the time paramedics arrived 30 minutes later, it was too late.

“I told him help was coming. But nobody helped me in that moment,” Vargas said.

Lyons said she was on the phone with Vargas as he desperately tried to keep his husband alive. She said the paramedics spent about an hour trying to revive him.

“Arnold was trying to keep him breathing … It was just terrible,” she said.

Gabrin had not been tested for the coronavirus, Vargas told NJ.com , adding that as a health care professional, they were quite certain he was infected.

The doctor thought he had the illness under control and would recover at home, his husband of about a year said.

“He told me, ‘I can handle this. I survived cancer and this is just the coronavirus,’” Vargas told the news outlet.

Meanwhile, Vargas said he has developed mild symptoms of the illness and is in quarantine.

Dr. Alvaro Alban, chairman of East Orange’s Emergency Department, said Gabrin was “delightful, caring and wonderful to work with.”

Related Video Video length 53 seconds :53 Coronavirus doctor describes the abuse him and his staff have been taking by patients Coronavirus doctor describes the abuse him and his staff have been taking by patients

“He had every intention to help. He was eager to keep working in the E.D. and was disappointed when he started to get symptoms. His intention was that his fever would break,” Alban told WNBC in a statement.

“Dr. Gabrin was motivated, on a mission and wanted to keep working,” he added.

In a moving post on Twitter, Lyons wrote that she lost her “best friend.”

“He planned to go back to work when he recovered. It took only five days from the first sign of symptoms. He leaves a husband of less than one year behind. We are devastated. #PPENow,” she wrote.

She also shared Vargas’ last post.

“Don’t forget about these tools people! They can be the most powerful drugs we have to use in this pandemic,” he wrote, adding words such as “tolerance,” “kindness,” empathy,” “compassion” and patience.”

In a statement to The Post, East Orange General Hospital said: “It is with a heavy heart that we mourn the loss of one of our beloved East Orange General Hospital family members. … Our thoughts and prayers are with Dr. Gabrin’s family and friends, and also with all our frontline caregivers who are dedicated to serving our community during this unprecedented COVID-19 outbreak.

“We are committed to ensuring the safety of our patients, staff and physicians. We currently have sufficient staffing, supplies and equipment – including N95 respirators and facemasks – on hand to care for patients,” it added.

A message left at the Queens hospital was not immediately returned.

Dr. William Jaquis, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, which represents 40,000 emergency doctors nationwide, also released a statement.

“We are deeply saddened to learn that a former ACEP member and our current colleague on the frontlines—an emergency physician—has lost his fight against this virus. Emergency physicians understand that sometimes in our efforts to save your life, we may end up sacrificing our own. This is not a decision made lightly or a post abandoned in times of need. We know the risks of the job we signed up for, but we are on the frontlines in this historic war against COVID-19 with insufficient protection.

“There are dire shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) in emergency departments across the country, and despite efforts to ramp up production, we do not see significant relief in the near future. America can’t afford for more emergency physicians and other frontline health care providers to get sick or worse due to PPE shortages,” he said.