Matt Hancock says NHS was ‘hours’ from PPE running out in Covid

The NHS in England came “six or seven o’clock” after the round of dresses and other protective equipment during the cocovio pandemic, Matt Hancock said.

The former Secretary of Health testified for the third time during the Covid survey, on the impact on health systems.

He said that there was never a “national shortage” of EPI for health workers, but “in certain places, they were exhausted – and it was horrible”.

Asked about the reports that some nurses had to bring bin-bags at the start of the cobed crisis, he said that the NHS needed to “learn the lessons of what was wrong” and set up “better stocks” for the future.

Mr. Hancock – Who was Secretary of Health at the start of the pandemic in 2020 – will testify over two days, while the survey survey on the impact on the NHS and health care in the four British nations.

Thursday, the chair of the investigation, the Baroness Hallett, had to occasionally interrupt the audience to tell the bereaved families of the public gallery – some of which were clearly very emotional – to lower the photographs of their deceased relatives.

Earlier, the former deputy was faced with solid questions on the compression of the facilities that many hospitals had endured at the top of the two most important waves in COVID.

In March 2020, Mr. Hancock said that he had been “petrified”, the newly announced locking rules may not be strict enough to avoid a repetition of scenes in northern Italy, where some patients coded had difficulty accessing care.

But while some hospitals in England have undergone “extraordinary pressure”, the wider NHS system has never been exceeded, he added.

Mr. Hancock was then questioned about the case of Suzie Sullivan, who died of COVID in 2020.

The medical notes written at the time said that Suzie did not suit a transfer to intensive care due to a pre -existing heart disease and Down syndrome. Her father, John, told a previous session of the investigation that she was “left to death” because of her handicap.

Mr. Hancock admitted that an intensive care bed could not be found for each patient who needed it at the top of the pandemic.

“Of course, there was enormous pressure, and of course, it has consequences,” he said.

He said that sometimes staff ratios were to be stretched, which means that nurses in specialized intensive care had to take care of six patients rather than lavish the individual care they would do in normal times.

But he added: “What we managed to avoid was a global ration – to say:” People, according to these characteristics, will not be taken care of “.”

“This is what would have happened if we had left the virus becoming more uncontrollable.

“Do people did as well as they would have done it in normal times? Of course not. There was a pandemic,” he told the investigation.

Asked about the tax restrictions imposed, which meant that some relatives could not be with dying family members in their last hours, and elsewhere, the pregnant fathers could not attend ante-natal analyzes, he said that “overall”, he thought that the government had obtained the “roughly” rules.

“Where I think we were wrong, for example, it was the way the funeral advice was applied to the field – it was not as planned.”

Other witnesses, including the Prime Minister of the Pays de Wales, Eluned Morgan, and the former Minister of Health in Scotland, Jeane Freeman, have suggested some of these restrictions, or the way in which they were implemented, could have gone too far.

Mr. Hancock also defended the government “staying at home, saving lives, protecting the messaging from the NHS, saying that it was” literally true “that” if we had not stopped the spread of the virus, the NHS would be exceeded “.

Giving proofs recently, the chief doctor of England, Professor Sir Chris Whitty, said that, with hindsight, the authorities did not condemn the public to know that the NHS was still open to non-comfortable patients during the pandemic.

Mr. Hancock alluded to the way he had to “rush a few feathers” to protect the NHS from political interference.

He said he thought it was his work to “protect” the health service for “difficult people at number 10”.

Part of the interference of people named politicians at Downing Street caused “incredible difficulties” with regard to the deployment of cocvid tests, he added.