Doctor in tears at Covid investigation: What NHS staff saw was ‘indescribable’

A senior doctor repeatedly burst into 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 “falling out of the sky”.

Prof Kevin Fong, a former clinical adviser in emergency, resilience and response at NHS England who was on duty during the London bombings on July 7, said the scale of deaths in hospitals at the height of the pandemic was “shocking” and “truly staggering”.

Some intensive care units in England were so overloaded that staff had to put bodies in three-metre-long clear plastic bin bags when the bags ran out, then immediately put another Covid patient in that person’s bed, he said.

Fong, an anaesthetist, testified at the public inquiry into Covid-19 that he has made more than 40 visits to intensive care units on behalf of NHS England to report from the frontline and support staff working there.

The data that officials in London relied on 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 collapse”.

Fong described his first visit in April 2020: “It was very memorable. I was greeted at the entrance by one of the intensive care workers. I immediately asked him what it was like. I will never forget it … He said, ‘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 that the intensive care teams experienced during Covid was unlike anything they had ever seen before. They are no strangers to death – they are the intensive care unit. They care for some of the sickest patients in the hospital, but the scale of death was really, really staggering.”

He added: “We had nurses talking about patients falling out of the sky, and one of the nurses told me they were tired of putting people in body bags.

“(One hospital) said that sometimes they were so busy that they would put patients in body bags, lift them out of bed, lay them on the floor and immediately put another patient in that bed because there was no time.

“We went to another hospital where things got so bad, they were so short on resources, they ran out of body bags, and instead they were given 9ft clear plastic bags and zip ties. And those nurses say they were really traumatized by that, because they had nightmares over and over again about the feeling that they were throwing bodies away.

“These people are used to seeing death, but not on that scale, and not in that way, and no matter what the numbers show you, the experience for them was indescribable… It was really like nothing else I’ve ever seen, and certainly like nothing else those teams have ever experienced.”

Fong said hearing from staff during his visits to hospitals in 2020 and 2021 was “very, very disturbing” as he saw first-hand how they were “drowning in patients” in scenes “from hell”. He repeatedly broke down in tears as he gave evidence to the inquiry in London on Thursday.

In one hospital, Fong said, “some nurses had chosen to wear adult diapers because there was literally no one to give them toilet breaks and take over their nursing duties.” Others had purchased face shields from Screwfix because they were not provided with personal protective equipment.

He said: “It’s easy for us to think we knew what was going on… But you don’t know unless you’re the people who go out on that shop floor. You don’t know unless (you’re) the people who are trying to find body bags and put people in plastic bags. You don’t know unless you’re the people who were holding iPads while family members were screaming on the phone.”