How Houston Defied Doomsday COVID Predictions, HTX books and art, transportation innovations, and more

This weeks items:

National Review: How Houston Defied Doomsday COVID Predictions: Houston’s approach is a model for how hospital systems should handle intense case surges. Hat tip to Joel. Excerpt:

“All of that was overblown. We never even got close to capacity,” Delgado stated. “It’s just crazy. Crazy, crazy, out of control, overblown stuff. It’s fear, basically. It’s a fear-factor so the patients, particularly older patients, are afraid to death to do anything. There’s elderly people with chest pain staying at home and just dying, or coming in late — someone brings them in — they’ve already had a big heart attack. A lot of that is going on, and it’s really unsettling.” …

“We always had the idea that we would not be overwhelmed quickly like New York,” Delgado said. “A lot of people got infected very quickly in New York because the population density there is just many orders of magnitude greater than Houston, Texas. That is the problem, the problem is all of them getting infected at a short period of time. That’s the problem, and that’s what screwed up everything in New York. That never was going to happen in Houston.”

A lot of interesting items in Reason’s July Surface Transportation Innovations:

Finally, another clever fun video from Pop Culture Urbanism’s Nolan Gray: The City Planning Behind “Avatar: The Last Air Bender”

This piece first appeared on Houston Strategies.

Tory Gattis is a Founding Senior Fellow with the Center for Opportunity Urbanism and co-authored the original study with noted urbanist Joel Kotkin and others, creating a city philosophy around upward social mobility for all citizens as an alternative to the popular smart growth, new urbanism, and creative class movements. He is also an editor of the Houston Strategies blog.

Photo credit: BAMC, 59th Medical Wing, U.S. Air Force, in Public Domain.