An organ transplant consultant who volunteered to tackle the coronavirus pandemic has become the first working NHS surgeon to die from the virus in the UK.

Adil El Tayar, who has been hailed a “hero” on social media, dedicated his life to carrying out vital life-saving operations around the world.

The 63-year-old Sudanese doctor, whose career spanned from south London to Saudi Arabia, died on 25 March at West Middlesex University Hospital in Isleworth in west London.

Dr El Tayar, who worked at St Mary’s and St George’s hospitals in London, had been self-isolating after starting to show symptoms in the middle of March. He had been volunteering in an A&E department in the Midlands to fight the coronavirus crisis.

Britain’s ambassador to Sudan and his family have paid tribute to the father-of-four who went into hospital on 20 March where he was placed on a ventilator after his health deteriorated.

“He wanted to be deployed where he would be most useful in the crisis,” Zeinab Badawi, his cousin who is a prominent British-Sudanese journalist, told BBC Radio 4. “That was typical of my cousin Adil; always willing to help, always with a willing smile.”

She added: “It had taken just 12 days for Adil to go from a seemingly fit and capable doctor working in a busy hospital to lying in a hospital morgue.”

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She said she had been “fairly phlegmatic” about the coronavirus pandemic until learning of her cousin’s death – adding that “there is nothing like a death in the family to bring home the realities” of the crisis the UK is plagued with.

Ms Badawi, who co-presented Channel 4 News with Jon Snow for a decade in the nineties before getting a prominent role at BBC News, added: “This virus is unforgiving, indiscriminate, and it can be brutal. Adil’s death had come out of the blue, his family are bereft, bewildered and struggling to come to terms with his passing.”

She said she was informed her cousin had passed away just minutes before she clapped for NHS workers like millions of others around the UK on Thursday night.

“Adil was a stoic and an optimist and was never one to imagine the worst so he thought he would soon recover,” Ms Badawi said. “But, after a week in bed, he took a turn for the worse and became very breathless.”

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Dr El Tayar, who is survived by his wife and four children, two of which are also NHS doctors, graduated from the University of Khartoum, the largest and oldest university in Sudan, in 1982 and moved to Britain in 1996.

He returned to Sudan around 10 years ago to set up a transplant programme and worked at the Ibn Sina Hospital in the country’s capital of Khartoum.

Irfan Siddiq, the British ambassador to Sudan, paid tribute to Dr El Tayar. “Saddened to hear of Sudanese doctor Adel Altayar’s death in the UK from Covid-19,” he tweeted.