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.
One medic told him it was like a “terrorist attack” every day and staff did not know when the attacks would stop. Speaking to the inquiry in central London, Prof Fong 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.