Treating patients during the pandemic was like responding to a daily terrorist attack, as Covid testing has shown.

Testifying, Professor Kevin Fong spoke about the staff he met during a visit to the hospital, who were “thorough”.

The former national clinical adviser in emergency preparedness at NHS England recalled a conversation she had with an intensive care doctor during a visit in December 2020.

“I immediately asked him how things were and… I will never forget, he replied that it has been like a terrorist attack every day since it started, and we don’t know when the attacks will stop.”

Professor Fong described Covid as “the greatest national emergency this country has faced since World War II”, and repeatedly fought back tears on the stand as she described what she saw and her interactions with other staff members.

During the pandemic, consultant anesthetist Professor Fong visited around 40 of the “worst affected” intensive care units on behalf of NHS England to provide peer support to the doctors and nurses working there.

He wrote reports which were fed back to senior managers, including Professor Sir Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer for England.

He said the “scale of death” was “very difficult to capture in statistics”.

“It was really, really amazing… We had nurses talking about patients being ‘rained out of the sky,’ where one of the nurses told me that they would put people in body bags— Tired of putting in.”

“We went to another unit where things got so bad that they were so short on resources, they ran out of body bags and replaced them with nine feet of clear plastic bags and cable ties.”

“These are people who are used to seeing death but not on that scale and not in that way.”

At the end of his testimony, he was thanked by the chair of the inquiry, Baroness Hallett, who said, “It was clear how distressing this was for you and it is never easy to relive such an ordeal.”

England’s chief medical officer Professor Sir Chris Whitty, who was due to speak at the inquiry, said he agreed with the evidence “very powerfully put” by Professor Fong.

He said NHS hospitals in England entered the pandemic with “much lower” levels of beds in intensive care than in similar high-income countries in early 2020.

“It is a political choice. It’s a system configuration option, but it’s an option,” he told the inquiry.

“So, you have less in reserve when there is a major emergency, even if it is somewhat less than the scale of Covid.”

Sir Chris suggested that countries like the UK had no choice but to impose lockdowns and other social restrictions to avoid “catastrophic” pressure on the health care system.

He acknowledged that “in many individual cases” doctors and nurses found the situation “incredibly difficult”, but added that without lockdown restrictions “hopefully it would have been much worse. It is no small amount worse”. , but is actually substantially worse.”

Asked about PPE for healthcare workers, Sir Chris said the messaging about which mask NHS staff should wear at the start of the pandemic was “confused”, leading to a “loss of trust”.

He suggested that more research is needed to see whether higher grade FFP3 masks provide more protection than basic surgical masks used in a hospital in real life rather than in a laboratory.

He said, “The question is what happens when people are using it day-to-day in operational conditions, and if it doesn’t hold up in those conditions, then it’s not working very well.”

He said that in future pandemics, he would give health workers the choice of which mask to wear.