LONDON: The family of a Sudanese surgeon who died from coronavirus has called for the British government to do more to protect hospital staff. Adil El-Tayar, an organ transplant consultant in London, who had also worked in Sudan and Saudi Arabia, was the first National Health Service (NHS) surgeon to die in the UK as a result of COVID-19. The 63-year-old passed away last Wednesday. “Our view is that the NHS needs to do much more to protect the frontline workers (and) it’s unacceptable that in 2020 in the UK, there is even a question about whether the frontline workers are well protected and they should have been testing frontline staff from the very beginning,” Othman El-Tayar told Arab News. He questioned why the NHS is not testing their doctors on a regular basis, let alone testing potential COVID-19 patients. “They tell us just to stay at home for a week and they tell you not to come to hospital unless you become short of breath, at which point it’s too late. So don’t come to the hospital unless you’re coming to die. I mean, it’s absolutely unbelievable,” he said. Othman said that his “father helped so many people throughout his life, not just through medicine, just as a person as well.” He said he hoped his father’s legacy will live on. “People need to be aware that this isn’t just a virus and just numbers on the television screen, this is now very real.” The UK government came under renewed pressure Tuesday over the shortage of protective equipment for health workers and the lack of coronavirus testing available for doctors and nurses. Dr Jenny Harries, the deputy chief medical officer for England, apologised for the delay in getting personal protective equipment to NHS staff. El-Tayar was volunteering on the front lines against the outbreak in a hospital in central England. His cousin, the British-Sudanese broadcast journalist Zeinab Badawi, paid tribute to the surgeon. “He wanted to be deployed where he would be most useful in the crisis,” she said on the BBC. On Monday, health workers paid tribute to another Sudanese-born health worker who died from coronavirus in the UK. Amged El-Hawrani, 55, an ear, nose and throat consultant, died in Leicester on Saturday.