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  • stay on the need for ventilators tonight.

  • Doctors who fear they will have to make choices.

  • And tonight, Americans with preexisting conditions compromised immune systems.

  • They have real concerns.

  • And what one cancer patient told us that, she was told.

  • Here's NBC's Matt Gutman tonight from California Tonight, with fatalities spiking over 25% in just a single day nationwide health workers on the front lines making grim life and death decisions the basic antibiotics are really hard to get.

  • Even medications This Today, patients are becoming more short as we're using them more and more often.

  • So you're saying it's not just pee pee that's short anymore.

  • It's like the basic tools of the trade of medicine in New York State.

  • They project needing 25,000 Maur ventilators.

  • Ganja is an E R doctor in Westchester.

  • I'm nervous about one day having to look a daughter in the eye and not being able to say that I did everything that I couldn't that we don't have a ventilator for her mom, that we're gonna leave her on oxygen and hope for the best.

  • Valerie Roberts, from Sacramento, is a grandmother and cancer survivor.

  • Healthcare providers are warning people to stay away from emergency rooms unless they're very sick.

  • They're also warning the vulnerable Like Roberts.

  • She says an oncology supervisor called her to say she should try to avoid the e.

  • R.

  • For her own safety in the event of his surge.

  • She told her San Francisco station KGO that the doctor also said this.

  • I wouldn't be probably a candidate for a ventilator if it was between me and a healthy person.

  • Know the conversation was tough in it that if you get this virus and get complications with it, we need to discuss comfort care for you.

  • Comfort care, as in morphine?

  • Yes, her hospital released a statement about the conversation, saying clinicians regularly communicate with medically vulnerable patients to fulfill their current health care needs.

  • We will do everything we can to fulfill those wishes.

  • Both now and in the event of a hospital surge.

  • Mandy Hall was on duty when a desperately ill covert patient came in.

  • He required immediate intervention for life saving measures.

  • The virus had recently killed the man's wife, but they delayed into baiting him because he had a very special wish to see his daughter one more time did he tell you that he understood that once he was intubated, he might not come out of it?

  • He did.

  • That is the reason why he requested to speak with his daughter before he was innovative.

  • Excruciating moments for all of these families already affected by this.

  • Matt Gutman, with us live from Los Angeles again tonight, and Matt L.

  • A.

  • County, they've announced an unusually high percentage of those hospitalized just today have no underlying conditions.

  • That's right, David.

  • A startling 76% of people hospitalized here in L.

  • A county are otherwise healthy and statewide, the number of I C.

  • U cases has quadrupled just since Friday, David.

  • But there is a sliver of good news.

  • 34,000 retired medical professionals are professionals out of work.

  • Have enrolled to get back in the workforce just over the past two days.

  • Hi, everyone.

  • George Stephanopoulos here.

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stay on the need for ventilators tonight.

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