LINCOLN — With hospitalizations rising and some hospitals increasingly stretched to the limit, Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts on Monday signed an order reinstating the state’s online COVID-19 information dashboard.

Health care officials applauded the move, saying it will make it easier to plan for and manage local outbreaks.

“You can’t make good decisions without good data,” said Dr. Bob Rauner, president of Partnership for a Healthy Lincoln.

New daily hospitalizations in Nebraska rose more than 20% last week to 50 per day, according to figures from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overall, an average of nearly 400 hospital beds were occupied by COVID patients on any given day last week.

At a Monday press conference, Ricketts said state officials are bringing back the dashboard because COVID hospitalizations have topped 10% of the state’s total staffed hospital beds. Ricketts said the dashboard would be dropped again if the percentage drops below 10%.

Ricketts said he enabled the creation of the dashboard by signing an executive order that waives some of the health care privacy restrictions in state law.

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