One of Britain’s most senior doctors fought back tears as he recalled scenes “from hell” in intensive care units during the Covid pandemic, including dying patients “raining from the sky”.

Professor Kevin Fong, who was tasked with helping lead an emergency response to the crisis, said hospitals were dealing with the equivalent of daily “terrorist attacks”.

In connection with the Covid investigation – which runs until 2026 – he also described how other units were so overwhelmed that they ran out of body bags.

The consultant anesthetist said he made more than 40 visits to intensive care units on behalf of NHS England to report back from the front line.

But the “scale of death” was “very difficult to capture” in those reports, which were sent to officials including England’s chief medical officer Professor Sir Chris Whitty.

At least 235,000 Britons are believed to have been killed by the virus since the pandemic began, with further deaths caused by the disruption to the NHS and regulars who screen for health problems like cancer.

Describing his first visit in April 2020, Professor Fong told the inquiry: “I was met at the entrance by one of the intensive care registrars.

I immediately asked him what it had been like. I’ll never forget … he replied: “It’s been like a terrorist attack every day since this started, and we don’t know when the attacks will stop”.

“The scale of death that the intensive care teams experienced during Covid was unlike anything they had ever seen before.

“They are no strangers to death – they are the intensive care unit.

“They care for some of the sickest patients in the hospital, but the scale of deaths was really, really staggering.”

He added: ‘We had nurses talking about patients raining from the sky, with one of the nurses telling me they just got tired of putting people in body bags.

“(One hospital) said that sometimes they were so overwhelmed that they put patients in body bags, lift them off the bed, put them on the floor and put another patient in that bed right away because there was no time.”

At another hospital, nurses started wearing adult diapers because they were so stretched they couldn’t take toilet breaks, he told the probe.

Others went to Screw Fix to buy visors for their own protective gear.

Professor Fong gave evidence for the inquiry’s third module which assessed the impact of the Covid pandemic on UK health care systems.

This has so far consisted of three weeks of public hearings and will continue until the end of November.

The former national clinical adviser in emergency preparedness, resilience and response at NHS England, who repeatedly broke down in tears, also said he was at the scene of the 1999 Soho bombing and worked in A&E during the 7/7 attacks.

“Nothing I saw during all these events was as bad as Covid really was every day for each of these hospitals through the pandemic surges,” he added.

“I worked a shift where we had six deaths in one shift. Another hospital told me they had 10 deaths in one shift, two of which were their own staff.

“We went to another unit where it got so bad that they were so short on resources, they ran out of body bags and instead were stuck with nine-foot clear plastic bags and cable ties.”

He described Covid as the “greatest national emergency this country has faced since World War II”.

It comes as the inquiry’s first report in July concluded that the UK government’s failure to prepare for a “foreseeable” pandemic led to mass death, “countless misery” and “economic turmoil”.

Chair Baroness Heather Hallett said a “harmful absence of focus” on measures needed to tackle a rapidly spreading disease was to blame for the “tragedy of every single death”.

The 240-page document also called for “radical reform” to protect against future pandemics, warning: “It is not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’ to strike”.

In her poignant 2,000-word foreword, Baroness Hallett concluded that “never again can a disease be allowed to cause so many deaths and so much suffering”.

“Had the UK been better prepared for and more resilient to the pandemic, some of the financial and human cost may have been avoided,” she added.

Families, communities and businesses were torn apart by a series of crippling lockdowns brought in by ministers in a bid to curb the spread of Covid.

Preparedness for a civil emergency must now be treated “in much the same way we treat a hostile state,” she recommended.

Responsibility for the strategy fell to three successive Conservative health secretaries: Andrew Lansley, Jeremy Hunt, who was in charge from 2012 to 2018, and Matt Hancock, health secretary during the pandemic.

The report questioned the failure of ministers, including former chancellor Mr Hunt, the longest-serving health secretary in modern times, to challenge “groupthink” that overlooked the threat of a coronavirus, such as Covid.

This first inquiry module, which examined pandemic preparedness before Covid struck, consisted of 23 days of public hearings held in central London during June and July last year.

Other modules include examining decision-making in the pandemic across the UK, vaccines, PPE procurement, the care sector, the impact of the pandemic on children and the economy.