A senior medic has broken down in tears as he described scenes “from hell” on intensive care wards during the Covid pandemic, with staff running out of body bags and sick patients “raining from the sky”.
Professor Kevin Fong – former national clinical adviser in emergency preparedness, resilience and response at NHS England – told the Covid inquiry he was on the scene of the Soho bombing in 1999 and worked in A&E during the July 7 London bombings “but nothing that I saw… was as bad as Covid was every single day” for the hospitals most badly hit during the pandemic.
Speaking to the inquiry in central London, he said: “The scale of death experienced by the intensive care teams during Covid was unlike anything they had ever seen before.
“They’re no strangers to death – they are the intensive care unit. They look after some of the sickest patients in the hospital, but the scale of death was truly, truly astounding.
“I worked on a shift where we had six deaths in a single shift. Another hospital told us that they had 10 deaths on a shift, two of whom were their own staff.
“We had nurses talking about patients raining from the sky, where one of the nurses told me they just got tired of putting people in body bags.
“(One hospital) said that sometimes they were so overwhelmed that they were putting patients in body bags, lifting them from the bed, putting them on the floor, and putting another patient in that bed straight away because there wasn’t time.
“We went to another hospital where things got so bad, they were so short of resource, that they ran out of body bags, and they were instead issued with 9ft clear plastic sacks and cable ties.
“And those nurses talk about being really traumatised by that, because they had recurring nightmares about feeling like they were just throwing bodies away.
“These people are used to seeing death, but not on that scale, and not like that…
“It really was like nothing else I have ever seen.”
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