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

Earlier, the former MP faced robust questioning about the squeeze on facilities many hospitals had endured at the peak of the two most significant waves of Covid.

In March 2020, Mr Hancock said he was “petrified” newly announced lockdown rules might not be stringent enough to avoid a repeat of scenes in northern Italy, where some Covid patients had struggled to access any care.

But while some hospitals in England came under “extraordinary pressure”, the wider NHS system was never overwhelmed, he added.

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

Medical notes written at the time stated Suzie was not suitable for a transfer to intensive care due to a pre-existing heart condition and having Down’s syndrome. Her father, John, told an earlier session of the inquiry she was “left to die” because of her disability.

Mr Hancock accepted that a bed in intensive care could not be found for everyone who needed it at the height of the pandemic.

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

He said, at times, staff ratios had to be stretched, meaning specialist critical care nurses had to look after six patients rather than give the one-to-one care they would in normal times.

But he added: “What we successfully avoided, was an overall rationing – to say, ‘people, according to these characteristics, aren’t going to be cared for’.”

“That’s what would have happened if we had let the virus get more out of control.

“Did people get as good care as they would have done in normal times? Of course not. There was a pandemic,” he told the inquiry.

Asked about the imposed visiting restrictions, which meant some relatives could not be with dying family members in their final hours, and elsewhere, expectant fathers could not attend ante-natal scans, he said “on balance” he believed the government got the rules “about right”.

“Where I think we got it wrong, for instance, was the way that the funeral guidance was applied on the ground – it wasn’t as had been intended.”

Other witnesses, including the first minister of Wales, Eluned Morgan, and Scotland’s former health minister Jeane Freeman, have suggested some of those restrictions went too far.