‘Scenes from hell’: Hospitals ran out of body bags and were close to collapse in pandemic, Covid inquiry told

Politicians chose not to equip the UK with enough intensive care units before the pandemic, the government’s chief medical officer has said, as a senior NHS doctor described scenes “from hell” on hospital wards.

NHS hospitals were dealing with the equivalent of daily “terrorist attacks” during the pandemic with wards so overwhelmed they ran out of body bags, former national clinical NHS advisor Professor Kevin Fong told the Covid-19 inquiry.

In a tearful account of the pandemic during Thursday’s hearing, he recalled seeing hospital wards with sick patients “raining from the sky”, with staff so overworked they were forced to wear nappies rather than go to the toilet.

The harrowing depiction of the pandemic came before Professor Sir Chris Whitty, chief medical officer for the government, admitted the number of intensive care unit (ICU) beds in the UK was too low compared to provision in other countries.

He said: “Taking ICU, in particular, the UK has a very low ICU capacity compared to most of our peer nations in high-income countries. Now that’s a choice, that’s a political choice. It’s a system configuration choice, but it is a choice. Therefore you have less reserve when a major emergency happens, even if it’s short of something of the scale of Covid.”

He talked about how systems could not be “scaled up” without trained workers, adding that beds and space can be purchased but that the limit to any system is having trained people.

Prof Whitty admitted the government made no plans for the mental health impact of the pandemic and said officials “didn’t get it across well enough” that people should continue to go to hospitals for serious illnesses other than Covid.

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Source: The Independent, 27 September 2024