In this interview, Dennis Prager speaks with Dr. Bo Breeze, an emergency‑room physician at Houston Methodist Hospital, to provide a weekly COVID‑19 update focused on Texas and Houston. Dr. Breeze reports that Texas cases have held steady while deaths rose 34% week‑over‑week, noting a recent peak of 162 deaths in a single day. He contrasts Texas’s per‑capita death rates with those of New York, California, Washington, and several European nations, arguing that Texas is performing better than many peers and that media narratives—particularly a New York Times article claiming the U.S. is losing the battle—are misleading. The discussion critiques the reliability of international data (e.g., China, Belarus, Russia), highlights Texas’s testing rank (24th overall, higher among large countries), and places COVID‑19 mortality in historical context by comparing it to the 1918 flu pandemic. They also note that nursing‑home residents account for roughly 40% of U.S. deaths, and that removing those figures roughly halves the mortality rate. Throughout, Dr. Breeze emphasizes the dedication of healthcare workers and the impact of chronic underfunding of public health on the pandemic response.
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become a weekly update on the coronavirus in Texas, particularly Houston. New York Times Magazine— I want my doctor that I'm about to speak to to hear this— New York Times Magazine yesterday: Why We're Losing the Battle with COVID-19. The escalating crisis in Texas shows how the chronic underfunding of public health has put America on track for the worst coronavirus response in the developed world. The doctor in question is Dr. Bo Breeze, emergency room physician at Houston Methodist Hospital. So a good Monday to you, Dr.
Breeze, and, and a good Monday to you too, Dennis Prager.
Thank you, sir. Uh, so is, uh, Texas, uh, the, uh, the, the center of the epidemic at this point, and is it about to collapse?
Uh, no, we're doing fine. I, considering that we've, you know, had a lot of work to do with coronavirus, I think we've done an absolutely outstanding job. Uh, this week versus last week in Texas, cases have held steady. Uh, in Texas, deaths are up about, uh, 34% this week. We had our worst day, which is 162 people unfortunately passing away in the state. Uh, which means that it was interesting. It's the New York Times that said that because they should pay attention to their own state. Our worst day is now 9 times fewer deaths than their worst day. Our worst week, which we had last week, is 45% fewer deaths than their worst day. Just to put this in their worst day, day, uh, overall we've had 12 times fewer deaths as a percent of population than New York. State. Um, you know, we, we regret the life of anyone who passed away from this. And I, like thousands of other, uh, tens of thousands of other healthcare workers, are doing everything we can to save everyone's life, make people feel as comfortable as we can as well, who aren't at risk. But this is the big lie, you know. They keep repeating and repeating and repeating that we're doing a horrible job. And it's fascinating because, you know, I don't know how much readership the New York Times has outside of, you know, the very center of urban populations in places like Austin in Texas, but they have a lot of readers in California, you know, and California's death rate and Washington State's death rate is 40% higher than ours overall. Texas held steady at being 35th in terms of DC plus states ranked in terms of the rate of death. And New York remains second. We're doing an outstanding job saving lives and they're maligning Texas. And, you know, it's interesting, you mentioned, the worst coronavirus response in the world. That's an absolutely fascinating thing to say. First of all, of course, it assumes that any of the numbers you're getting out of places like, you know, communist China where they have, you know, more than a million Muslims in concentration camps are going to be accurate numbers about that. But in addition to that, compared to transparent countries, we're doing quite well. We have a lower death rate in the United States overall than Belgium, UK, Spain, Italy, Sweden and France. We're doing better than them. If the testing rate is how we're judging things, which is a lot of what I heard the media, especially in the White House press conferences, judging the work of the president on— we're looking at death— at the testing rate, we're 24th. But that's a skewed number because most of those countries in that rank are very small countries like Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, San Marino, the Channel Islands. China, if you even count that as a country. The large countries that are above us in terms of testing rate are Denmark, Lithuania, UK, Israel, Belarus, and Russia. And I don't even know if you can trust the numbers from Belarus and Russia. So other than Denmark, Lithuania, the UK, and Israel, we've tested more people as a rate of population. So we're doing an outstanding job. And I think we should look at this in terms of historical significance. Here's this plague that is supposedly racking our population in a way that none other have. But it is— in the United States, we have lost— and again, you know, I, I've dedicated my life obviously to saving lives, and so I don't want to minimize this, but I want to put it into perspective. We've lost 143,000 Americans so far. That's 0.04% of the population, 1 in 2,500. All of this, and we've lost 1 in 2,500.
And if you remove people from nursing homes Double it. It's 1 in 5,000.
Right. Roughly, roughly, that's correct because the nursing homes are 40% or more of the deaths that we're having, uh, because that's the most vulnerable population. And you want— we want to, you know, how, how is the world doing? How is America doing? Well, in the plague of 1918, 2 to 3% of the population died of the flu. That's 50 times more as a percent of the population.
Right. Hold on there. This is really important. Dr. Bowbriz in Houston.
