A senior doctor repeatedly broke down in tears as he described how the Covid crisis for NHS staff was like having to respond to a “terrorist attack every day”, with infected patients “raining from the sky”.
Prof Kevin Fong, a former clinical adviser in emergency preparedness, resilience and response at NHS England who was on shift during the 7/7 London bombings, said the scale of death in hospitals at the height of the pandemic was “shocking” and “truly astounding”.
Some intensive care units in England were so overwhelmed that staff had to put dead bodies in 3-metre clear plastic refuse sacks after running out of body bags, and then immediately put another Covid patient in that person’s bed, he said.
Giving evidence to the Covid-19 public inquiry, Fong, a consultant anaesthetist, said he made more than 40 visits to intensive care units on behalf of NHS England to report back from the frontline and offer support to the staff working there.
The data that officials in London relied upon to understand how hospitals were faring failed to capture the reality of the crisis on the frontline, he said, with some hospitals “bursting at the seams” and close to “a state of collapse”.
Describing his first visit in April 2020, Fong said: “It was very memorable. I was greeted at the entrance by one of the intensive care registrars. I asked him immediately what things had been like. I’ll never forget … He replied: ‘It’s been like a terrorist attack every day since this started, and we don’t know when the attacks are going to stop.’
“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.”
He added: “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, and whatever the figures show you, the experience for them was indescribable … It really was like nothing else I have ever seen, and certainly not like nothing else those teams have ever seen in their experience.”
Fong said hearing from staff during his visits to hospitals in 2020 and 2021 was “very, very distressing” as he saw first-hand how they were “drowning in patients” in scenes “from hell”. He repeatedly broke down in tears while giving evidence to the inquiry in London on Thursday.
In one hospital, Fong said, “some of the nurses had chosen to wear adult diapers because there was literally no one to give them a toilet break and take over their nursing duties”. Others had bought visors from Screwfix because they had not been provided with personal protective equipment.
He said: “It’s easy for us to think that we knew what’s going on … But you don’t know unless you’re the people going into that shop floor. You don’t know unless [you are] the people trying to find body bags and putting people in plastic sacks. You don’t know, if you are not the people who held on to iPads while relatives were screaming down the phone.”
