TMC, which usually treats over 10 million patients a year, gave Houston a massive advantage in the COVID fight with its size and resources. With 49 member institutions across the public and private sectors, TMC is the world’s largest medical complex and represents a large portion of Houston’s sizeable health-care system. The collaboration set a precedent, as calls between the hospitals’ chief operating officers and their human-resources and critical-care departments became routine. “We started planning that far in advance, so we were very confident of our capacity and our plans,” he told National Review. On March 3, as New York City confirmed its second coronavirus case, TMC CEO Bill McKeon had already begun a daily coronavirus conference call for the city’s hospital CEOs. Ultimately, a number of key factors - and some good fortune along the way - explains why Houston’s COVID death-count represents just 6 percent of New York’s.

To get a better picture of what actually happened on the ground, National Review spoke to over half a dozen doctors and administrators in Houston’s public and private hospital systems. Why, then, were the comparisons to New York and the predictions of mass-hospitalization made in the first place? Data from the Southeast Texas Regional Advisory Council (SETRAC) shows that Harris County’s coronavirus bed census has been nearly cut in half, from almost 4,000 confirmed and suspected COVID hospital cases on July 15 to 2,083 on August 10. Following its record-high spike in daily hospitalizations, TMC has seen a steady decline over several weeks, with Monday’s 127 new COVID hospitalizations marking the system’s best day since June 14.

Doomsday covid