‘Scenes from hell’: Hospitals ran out of body bags and were close to collapse in pandemic

‘Scenes from hell’: Hospitals ran out of body bags and were close to collapse in pandemicPA

Transcript

00:00The scale of death experienced by the intensive care teams during COVID was unlike anything

00:09they had ever seen before. They're no strangers to death. They are the intensive care unit.

00:15They look after some of the sickest patients in the hospital. But the scale of death was

00:20truly, truly astounding. I worked on a shift where we had six deaths in a single shift.

00:26The hospital told us that they had 10 deaths in the shift, two of whom were their own staff.

00:32We had nurses talking about patients raining from the sky. One of the nurses told me that

00:42they just got tired of putting people in body bags. Now, the hospital, they said that sometimes

00:47they were so overwhelmed that they were putting patients in body bags, lifting them from the

00:54bed, putting them on the floor, putting another patient in that bed straight away because

00:58there wasn't time. We went to another unit where things got so bad, they were so short

01:07of resource that they ran out of body bags and they were instead issued with nine-foot

01:12clear plastic sacks and cable ties. And those nurses talk about being really traumatized

01:19by that because they had recurring nightmares about feeling like they were just throwing

01:24bodies away. These people are used to seeing death, but not on that scale and not like

01:30that. It really was like nothing else I have ever seen and certainly not like nothing else

01:35those teams had ever seen.