A SENIOR medic broke down in tears today as he described scenes “from hell” on intensive care wards during the Covid pandemic.
Former national clinical adviser in emergency preparedness, resilience and response at NHS England Professor Kevin Fong told the Covid Inquiry that staff ran low on body bags and sick patients were “raining from the sky.”
He said 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, Prof Fong said that in one hospital, nurses took to wearing adult nappies because they were so stretched they could not take toilet breaks.
Prof Fong said: “It’s easy for us to think that we knew what’s going on … I think that it was easy to convince ourselves that we knew what was happening.”
He broke down as he added: “But you don’t know unless you’re the people going into that shop floor.
“You don’t know if you’re the not the people who are putting on PPE before we got vaccinations available, wondering if it’s buttoned up OK.
“You don’t know unless [you are] the people are trying to find body bags and putting people in plastic sacks.
“You don’t know, if you are not the people who held onto iPads while relatives were screaming down the phone.
“You don’t know if you haven’t sat in transfer vehicles next to a patient who’s dying of Covid, wondering if your PPE is buttoned up well enough that you might not do the same.
“It is impossible to know.
“Although this is not hard numerical data, the information is important. There is more to know than just what you can count.”
The inquiry also heard from England’s chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, who said officials “didn’t get it across well enough” that people should continue to go to hospital for serious illnesses other than Covid, as he defended the fact not all patients could access NHS care.
Prof Whitty said the pandemic was “the largest medical emergency” since the second world war in a high-income country and this made the “system really not work anywhere near as effectively as it would if Covid had not been there.”
