Ambulance technician Mark Tilley told the Covid-19 Inquiry how he turned up at people's houses to find someone dead just inside the front window or on their pathway.

‘I would have normally gone over, started bouncing up and down on their chest, but we went and got our masks and suits on and all of that,' Tilley said. ‘That plays on my mind all the time.'

Council to the inquiry Alice Hands related ambulance crews saying they were ‘forced not to intervene… and watch people die' while they put on equipment.

Tilley related how crews were forced to stay in Premier Inns Holiday Inns on 12-hour shifts.

He said: ‘So you couldn't go and socialise because that was stopped at that particular point in time, so you were at work in an ambulance with your crewmate for 10 hours, 12 hours, then you'd go back to the hotel, and that's where you would sit, sleep, and you had nowhere to go.

‘So it was the facilities that was there, the television and a phone. You had just to mull over what you'd been seeing, the queues at the hospital, the poor patients that we were going to.'

The inquiry continues.