Prof Fong described Covid as the “biggest national emergency this country has faced since World War Two”, and repeatedly broke down 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 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 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.”
He said that “despite the best efforts of everyone in the system” the surge of demand for healthcare caused by Covid meant it was “not possible to deliver the standard of care that would ordinarily be expected.”
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.”
