Treating patients during the pandemic was like responding to a daily terror attack, the Covid inquiry has heard.Giving testimony, Professor Kevin Fong, spoke of staff he met during a hospital visit being in “total bits”. The former national clinical adviser in emergency preparedness at NHS England recalled a conversation with an intensive care doctor during a visit in December 2020.“I asked him immediately what things had been like and… I’ll never forget, he replied 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 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 …
