Brooks Memorial Hospital is restricting visitation at this time.

Chautauqua County hospitals received some encouraging news from state Gov. Andrew Cuomo this week. Cuomo announced elective outpatient treatments can resume in counties and hospitals not facing a significant risk of a COVID-19 surge in the near term.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the county had only two active cases from the 28 positive results that have been tested since the middle of March.

A lack of those surgeries have hampered some Western New York health-care institutions, especially in Niagara County. According to The Buffalo News last week, Eastern Niagara Hospital in Lockport and Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center announced employee furloughs despite more than 260 coronavirus cases in the county. Also, Catholic Health and Kaleida Health in Buffalo asked senior administrators to take pay cuts due to the financial crunch.

On Wednesday, Kaleida Health announced it was offering a temporary voluntary furlough program for its staff. The primary voluntary furlough program is part of a joint agreement with 1199SEIU and CWA1168, which represent more than 8,000 Kaleida Health employees.

In the Southern Tier, Kaleida reported, Olean General Hospital and Bradford Regional Medical Center reported losses of $2.7 million in March, with projected losses in April estimated at $6.8 million.

“Like other health-care organizations across Western New York, New York state and the entire country, the pandemic has significantly impacted our bottom line,” said Jody Lomeo, president and chief executive officer of Kaleida Health. “As a result, we have made a number of changes to help reduce expenses and cut costs. The voluntary furlough program is a temporary but significant move to help us navigate the financial challenges that we are facing.”

“It’s important that we recognize labor for their partnership and willingness to step up and help at this critical juncture.”

Here at home, however, the three medical facilities are reporting business as usual when it comes to staffing.

UPMC, which oversees UPMC Chautauqua in Jamestown, announced weeks ago that it is protecting employee pay through May 9, spokeswoman Karen Beardsley said in a statement to The Post-Journal. “We aren’t going to speculate about the future, but as always, UPMC is taking actions to control our own fate so that we can have the best possible outcomes for our patients and staff,” she said. “We will take whatever actions are necessary to provide world-class care to our patients while ensuring a bright future for our staff long after this pandemic is over.”

Westfield Memorial Hospital and the Brooks-TLC Hospital System Inc. also indicated in an e-mail to the OBSERVER that neither have reduced staff since the crisis began in last month. For its part, Brooks-TLC closed Lakeshore Hospital in Irving on Feb. 2 that shedded some 200 positions.

Cuomo said hospitals will be able to resume performing elective outpatient treatments on April 28 if the hospital capacity is over 25 percent for the county and if there have been fewer than 10 new hospitalizations of COVID-19 patients in the county over the past 10 days.

As of Tuesday, the Chautauqua and Cattaraugus counties qualified while restrictions will remain in Erie County.

“As New York continues to flatten the curve of new COVID-19 infections, we are now ready to lift the restrictions on elective surgeries in regions where hospital capacity and the rate of new infections do not present a significant risk of a surge in new positive cases,” Cuomo said. “It is essential that we continue to support hospitals and health care workers in all regions to ensure they have both capacity and supplies to treat COVID patients because this virus is by no means defeated.”

Post-Journal city editor Eric Tichy contributed to this article.