Lincoln – Nebraska will take a first step toward relaxing its statewide coronavirus restrictions on May 4 by allowing hospitals to resume elective surgeries if they meet certain conditions, Gov. Pete Ricketts announced this week.

Ricketts said he will lift the state’s ban on elective surgeries for hospitals that have at least 30% of their beds, intensive-care unit space and ventilators available. Hospitals also must have at least two weeks’ worth of personal protective equipment in stock before can resume surgeries.

The order also applies to veterinary and dental services, Ricketts said at a news conference at the state Capitol last Monday. Elective surgeries are procedures that are planned in advance, such as knee or hip replacements, as opposed to emergency surgeries that need to be done right away.

“We want to open these back up to be able to allow those folks who need to have those surgeries to be able to start scheduling those and start having those surgeries performed,” Ricketts said. “It’s also an important source of revenue for many hospitals, so in order to help sustain our hospitals and make sure they’re available to take help care of our coronavirus patients, we want them to have a revenue source to be able to stay in business.”

Ricketts ordered a halt to all elective surgeries last month to try to keep the virus from spreading and overloading hospitals at a time when they needed to focus on treating new confirmed cases. The restrictions include a ban on gatherings larger than 10 people and a mandate for restaurants and bars to close their dining areas.

Nebraska is among a small handful of states without formal stay-at-home orders in place, although its restrictions are very similar and in some cases more strict than what other states have. Ricketts imposed the restrictions regionally before expanding them statewide, and the first ones that were put in place in the Omaha area are scheduled to expire April 30 but still could be renewed.

The decision was based on the large amount of available bed space and equipment in many of the state’s hospitals, Ricketts said. In Omaha, for instance, hospitals still have 75% of all their ventilators and about half of their beds available, he said. Statewide, Nebraska has about 190 people hospitalized with the virus.

“We’re not seeing that it’s being overwhelmed, and so we believe we have the ability to start loosening the restrictions with those caveats,” Ricketts said.

The Douglas County Health Department reported Monday that 408 ventilators available to area hospitals, with 101 were in use, which inclued 17 for confirmed COVID-19 patients.

It’s not clear whether all hospitals will be able to resume elective surgeries by May 4.

Some hospitals in Hall County have seen much larger proportion of coronavirus patients relative to their size because the area is considered a hot spot. Hall County, which includes Grand Island, has the largest number of known cases in Nebraska largely because of meatpacking and food-processing plants and assisted living homes for the elderly in the county.

Many hospitals rely on elective procedures to stay afloat financially, especially in rural areas that don’t see many emergency patients, said Andy Hale, a lobbyist for the Nebraska Hospital Association. Hale said more than half of Nebraska’s hospitals were considered “financially stressed” before the pandemic, with operating margins of less than 2%, and the coronavirus has likely made the problems worse.

“When you look around at different parts of the country, it’s the small hospitals that weren’t doing well to begin with,” Hale said.

The association doesn’t yet know which hospitals will resume surgeries on May 4 because some of them may be worried about a sudden, unexpected spike in coronavirus cases, Hale said. He added that individual hospitals will make the decisions for themselves, based on what’s happening in their areas.

“I think a lot of our hospitals, unless they’re in one of those hot spot areas, are going to go ahead and start back up,” Hale said.