Covid Inquiry: Hospital staff compare pandemic to 'terrorist attack' with bodies 'raining from sky'

A top medic wept as he said intensive care wards in the pandemic were like “hell”. Professor Kevin Fong described asking a registrar at one of the hardest hit intensive care units about the situation.

He said: “I’ll never forget his reply, he said, ‘It’s been like a terrorist attack every day since it started and we don’t know when the attacks are going to stop’. It really was like nothing else I have ever seen.” The former national clinical adviser in emergency preparedness at NHS England was speaking at the Covid-19 Inquiry in London.

Prof Fong was on the scene for 1999’s Soho bombing and in A&E for the London 7/7 bombings but said: “The scale of death experienced by the intensive care teams during Covid was unlike anything they’d ever seen before.

READ MORE: Covid nurses were so busy in pandemic they used adult nappies to avoid toilet breaks

“They look after some of the sickest patients 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 told me they just got tired of putting people in body bags.

“[One hospital] said that sometimes they were so overwhelmed 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 resources, that they ran out of body bags, and they were instead issued with 9ft clear plastic sacks and cable ties. Those nurses talk about being really traumatised by that, because they had recurring nightmares about feeling like they were just throwing bodies away.”

The inquiry heard that in one hospital nurses wore adult nappies because they were so stretched they could not take toilet breaks.

The Royal College of Nursing’s Prof Nicola Ranger said: “They [nurses] faced an almost unimaginable scale of death in a health and care system which was completely overwhelmed.”