Treating patients during the pandemic is like dealing with daily terror attacks, a Covid inquiry has heard.

Giving evidence, Professor Kevin Fong spoke of being "completely devastated" by the staff he encountered during his hospital visit.

The national clinical adviser on emergency preparedness for NHS England recalled a conversation with an intensivist during a visit in December 2020.

"I immediately asked him what was going on... I will never forget, and he replied that every day since the beginning has been like a terrorist attack and we don't know when the attacks will stop."

Professor Fang described the coronavirus outbreak as "the most serious national emergency the country has faced since World War II" and cried multiple times on the podium as he described what he saw and his conversations with other staff. .

During the epidemic, consultant anesthetist Professor Fang made around 40 visits to the "hardest-hit" intensive care units on behalf of NHS England to provide peer support to the doctors and nurses working there.

The report he wrote was sent back to senior managers including England's chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty.

He said the "scale of deaths" was "difficult to put into numbers".

"It was really, really shocking... We had nurses talking about patients 'falling from the sky' and one of the nurses told me they were tired of putting patients in body bags."

"We went to another unit and things got really bad there and they were so low on resources that they ran out of body bags and replaced them with nine-foot-tall clear plastic bags and zip ties."

"These people are used to death, but they haven't seen death of this magnitude, and it's not death like that."

Professor Fang said that "despite the best efforts of everyone in the system", the surge in demand for healthcare caused by the coronavirus meant that "it is impossible to provide the standard of care that would normally be expected".

He described the worst he had witnessed: "I was at the scene during the Soho bombings in 1999, and I was in the emergency room working with the helicopter medical service during the suicide bombings on July 7. In all of this , I didn’t see anything.” Every day during the pandemic surge, these hospitals are facing conditions as bad as COVID-19.

"It's painful right now because it's very clear what's happening to the patients and it's very clear what's happening to the staff. The staff are overwhelmed and very traumatized by the whole thing."

In December 2020, as coronavirus infection rates were rising again across the UK, he said he was asked to go to an unnamed hospital with a medium intensive care unit.

"I'll never forget it," he said. "It was a hellish scene."

"This is a hospital in huge trouble... there are so few staff that some nurses choose to either use patients' toilets or wear adult nappies because no one is actually giving them access to the toilet," he added. .

"This is a hospital on the verge of collapse."

At the end of his evidence, Baroness Hallett, the inquiry's chair, thanked him, saying: "It's clear how traumatic this must have been for you and reliving an ordeal like this is never easy."

England's chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, who was next to speak at the inquiry, said he agreed with Professor Fong's "very strong" evidence.

He said NHS hospitals in the UK entered the pandemic at the start of 2020 with "very low" levels of intensive care beds compared with similar high-income countries.

"It's a political choice. It's a system configuration choice, but it's a choice," he told the inquiry.

"So when a major emergency occurs, even if it's not on the scale of COVID-19, your reserves are going to be reduced."

Sir Chris suggested that countries like the UK have no choice but to impose lockdowns and other social restrictions to avoid "catastrophic" pressure on the healthcare system.

He acknowledged that "in many individual cases" doctors and nurses were finding the situation "extremely difficult" but said that without lockdown restrictions "it would be expected to get worse. The extent of the deterioration is not trivial but serious." many".

Asked about personal protective equipment for healthcare workers, Sir Chris said there was "confusing" information about which masks NHS staff should wear at the start of the pandemic, leading to "an erosion of trust".

He suggested that more research is needed to see whether higher-grade FFP3 masks provide more protection than basic surgical masks in real-life hospital use, rather than in labs.

"The question is, what happens when people use it day in and day out in an operational environment, and if it doesn't work in that situation, then it's not going to be of much benefit," he said.

He said that in future pandemics, he would let health care workers choose which masks to wear "within reason."