Professor Kevin Fong compared hospitals to “scenes from hell” during the Covid-19 pandemic in what has been described as one of the most devastating testimonies of the Covid Inquiry.
The former national clinical adviser in emergency preparedness at NHS England likened the pandemic to a daily terror attack, saying he’d spoken to intensive care doctors who said they had no idea when the attacks were going to stop.
Prof Fong described Covid as the “biggest national emergency this country has faced since World War Two”, and repeatedly broke down in tears on the stand while describing what he had seen and his conversations with other staff members.
During the pandemic, Prof Fong, a consultant anaesthetist, conducted around 40 visits of the “hardest hit” intensive care units on behalf of NHS England to offer peer support to the doctors and nurses working there.
He wrote reports which were sent back to senior managers including England’s chief medical officer Prof Sir Chris Whitty.
He said the “scale of death” was “very difficult to capture in the figures”.
“It was truly, truly astounding… We had nurses talking about patients ‘raining from the sky’, where one of the nurses told me they got tired of putting people in body bags.”
“We went to another unit where things got so bad they were so short of resources, they ran out of body bags and instead were stuck with nine-foot clear plastic sacks and cable ties.”
“These are people who are used to seeing death but not on that scale and not like that.”
“Political choice”
At the end of his evidence, he was thanked by the inquiry’s chairwoman Baroness Hallett who said “it was obvious how distressing it was for you and reliving such an ordeal is never easy.”
England’s chief medical officer Prof Sir Chris Whitty, who was next to speak at the inquiry, said he agreed with the evidence “very powerfully laid out” by Prof Fong.
He said that NHS hospitals in England entered the pandemic in early 2020 with a “very low” level of beds in intensive care compared to similar high-income countries.
“That’s a political choice. It’s a system configuration choice, but it is a choice,” he told the inquiry.
“Therefore, you have less in reserve when a major emergency happens, even if it’s short of something of the scale of covid.”
Sir Chris suggested that countries like the UK had no alternative but to impose lockdown and other social restrictions to avoid a “catastrophic” amount of pressure on the healthcare system.
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