Damning Covid Report reveals NHS on brink of collapse throughout ‘conflict zone’ pandemic

On Mar 19, 2026

Campaign group COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice called today’s report “utterly damning”, warning “Our health service is now in a worse position to cope with another pandemic”

17:27, 19 Mar 2026

We learned two important things today at the Covid Inquiry. The NHS came close to collapse – and we were never all in this together. While ‘superhuman’ hospital staff held our NHS together by sheer will and skill, the Tory Austerity government presided over a historically underfunded health system on the brink of going under.

While friends of some Conservative ministers won the lottery on PPE contracts, the NHS was just days away from running out of key items, such as masks, gloves and gowns. While Downing Street dithered, hospital staff lifted the dead into body-bags and left them on the floor to more quickly fill the bed and save a life.

While No10 staff wheeled suitcases of booze into work because they ‘deserved a break’, health-workers slept on hospital floors and camp beds between shifts. Today, the third of 10 reports from the official Covid-19 inquiry, took us back inside the circles of hell hospital staff lived in for months on end – “under intolerable pressure” and “dangerously low” on equipment.

“Healthcare systems coped with the pandemic, but only just,” Chair of the Inquiry, Baroness Heather Hallett, said. “On a number of occasions, they teetered on the brink of collapse and only coped thanks to the almost superhuman efforts of healthcare workers and all the staff who support them.

To suggest the health service was not “overwhelmed” as Matt Hancock tried to do during his evidence, was “semantics”, Lady Hallett said. “There was clearly overwhelm.” A staggering 80 per cent of healthcare professionals said that during the pandemic they felt they had to act in a way that conflicted with their values – with some saying they felt they were “playing God” because they couldn’t save everyone.

In truth, the Tory Austerity government had already played God, by underfunding the NHS to the point where it was barely fit for purpose. In one distressing example, patient-staff ratios were reduced to the point where one intensive care unit nurse said all she could was “manage the alarms”. The RCN General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing Professor Nicola Ranger said nursing staff faced an “unprecedented scale of death.”

This report was based on a 10-week hearing in 2024 that has been among the toughest of any of the evidence sessions. Lady Hallett considered 300 written statements and 300,000 pages of evidence, as well as the testimony of 93 witnesses. Part Three covered not just reports from the NHS frontline, but the devastating ways people were affected by the Stay Home restrictions.

The children who said goodbye to dying parents on Facetime, on a camera held by an exhausted doctor. The people who died alone. The women who gave birth without their partners, and the children in psychiatric units who were not visited. The health workers who burned out and were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after working in what some described as “war zones”.

Campaign group COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice called today’s report “utterly damning”. But their statement carried a warning too. “This is not only about past failure,” the families said. “Our health service is now in a worse position to cope with another pandemic than it was six years ago, and the current meningitis outbreak underlines why restoring resilience and capacity to our Health System should be a matter of priority for those in power.

Article continues below

“It shouldn’t take the deaths of our loved ones or the tragic death of young people at university to put public health back on the political agenda.” Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.