The pandemic was incredibly ‘harrowing’ for NHS staff, says England’s chief medical officer.
Speaking to the COVID-19 inquiry, Professor Sir Chris Whitty suggested that countries like the UK had no alternative but to impose lockdown and other social restrictions to avoid a ‘catastrophic’ amount of pressure on the healthcare system.
Asked about the reason for the first lockdown, Sir Chris said that the aim was to minimise the number of people who died, both directly and indirectly from COVID.
‘People often forget that, at the time, cases were exponentially rising, with a doubling rate of three to four days. At the point we are talking, about four doubling times more would have led us to an absolutely catastrophic situation. If we had not had the lockdown, the expectation is that would have got a lot worse. I don’t mean just trivial worse, but really quite substantially worse.’
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Sir Chris gave evidence to Jacqueline Carey KC, counsel to the inquiry, about the Government’s pandemic preparedness in 2020. He spoke after Professor Kevin Fong - former national clinical adviser in emergency preparedness at NHS England - presented an emotional testimony.
Professor Fong described COVID as the ‘biggest national emergency this country has faced since World War Two’.
‘It was truly, truly astounding,’ he said. ‘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.’
Sir Chris, who worked on wards during the pandemic, agreed with the ‘powerfully laid evidence’ presented by Professor Fong. Considering a future approach to a pandemic, Sir Chris said the Government could increase NHS capacity, especially ICU capacity and implement non-pharmaceutical interventions like lockdowns.
‘But the way out of these is always going to be science in the end, as it was for this one, with vaccines,’ he said.
The COVID inquiry is currently taking evidence about the impact of the pandemic on the NHS and healthcare systems across all four nations of the UK. More than 50 witnesses are expected to appear before the panel, which runs until the end of November.