‘Scenes from hell’: Hospitals ran out of body bags and were close to collapse in pandemic, Covid inquiry told
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.
Speaking to the inquiry in central London, he 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. 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 of the nurses told me they just got tired of putting people in body bags.
“(One hospital) said that sometimes they were so overwhelmed that 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 resource, that they ran out of body bags, and they were instead issued with 9ft clear plastic sacks and cable ties.
“And those nurses talk about being really traumatised by that, because they had recurring nightmares about feeling like they were just throwing bodies away.
“These people are used to seeing death, but not on that scale, and not like that… It really was like nothing else I have ever seen.”
In one hospital, nurses took to wearing adult nappies because they were so stretched they could not take toilet breaks. Others went to Screw Fix to buy visors for their own protective equipment.
Prof Fong also told the inquiry he undertook an informal visit to one of the “hardest hit” intensive care units in the country.
“It was very memorable, I was greeted at the entrance by one of the intensive care registrars,” he said.
“I asked him immediately what things have been like. 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’.”
Prof Fong said the experience for NHS staff on the front line in intensive care was “indescribable” and there were units where 70% of patients died.
During one visit in late December 2020, Prof Fong said he was at a hospital with a medium-sized unit.
“I’ll never forget it,” he said. “It was a scene from hell.
“This was a hospital in massive, massive trouble. We went to an intensive care unit…
“There were so few staff that some of the nurses had chosen to either use the patient commodes in the side rooms, and some of the nurses had chosen to wear adult diapers because there was literally no one to give them a toilet break and take over their nursing duties.
