Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts is putting an early end to the restrictions he put on elective surgeries this summer to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed with patients during the latest surge in the coronavirus pandemic.
The restrictions on inpatient Class D and E elective surgeries for all acute care, critical care and children’s hospitals in Nebraska had been set to expire at the end of the month, but Ricketts has rescinded them effective tomorrow.
The governor says that’s because COVID-19 hospitalizations have fallen below 10% of statewide hospital bed capacity, the threshold he’d set when imposing the moratorium on most lower-priority surgeries.
The order applied to Class D and E surgeries, elective procedures that can wait four weeks or longer without substantially changing a patient’s outcome.