When Houston’s public-hospital system, Harris Health, began to run out of options amid the surge’s peak in mid July, TMC’s other hospitals pitched in to keep things under control by taking on patients and providing additional testing, according to Harris Health CEO Dr. Esmaeil Porsa.

“I honestly think without that degree of collaboration, I think the story would have been very different,” Porsa admitted. He said that, fearing the worst, he had even prepared the “kitchen sink option” of turning post-anesthesia recovery beds into additional ICU space, but was fortunately never forced to utilize that option.

“All the TMC hospital CEOs, getting together every morning to touch base over the data, trying to understand what’s going on, and creating a situation where we were already helping each other in terms of distributing patients, that, to me, has been the most significant part of this whole thing,” he stated.

Houston also had some good fortune. Unlike in New York, Houston’s surge took months to come to fruition.