In the wake of Gov. Kevin Stitt’s decision to start reopening Oklahoma’s economy, Oklahoma Watch reached out for reactions from top medical groups and checked the remarks from Oklahoma City and Tulsa mayors. Here’s what we gleaned:

Oklahoma State Medical Association

Dr. George Monks, president of the Oklahoma State Medical Association, stuck by his initial assertion that the governor’s May 1 date for the first phase of reopening was hasty. But he said Stitt had to take into account more than just medical advice.

“He’s got economic advisers and he’s got medical advisers, and he’s in a really tough position because he has to weigh the economic health of our state with the health of the citizens,” Monks said Friday. “It’s a really, really tough job. But he’s made a decision and so now we’re moving forward and we’re going to continue to work with the governor to make sure that we take care of Oklahoma citizens.”

Monks said data shows Oklahoma is in good shape so far on hospital beds and ventilators.

“We’re very blessed as a state to have a large number of hospital beds, ICU beds and ventilators compared to our population,” Monks said. “We were in a good position going into it and we’re significantly below our maximum capacity on all of those things.”

Testing capability, especially on the antibody side, needs to be an ongoing focus as the state moves through each reopening phase. On an individual level, Monks said residents should still adhere to personal hygiene, masking guidelines and social distancing guidelines.

Oklahoma Nurses Association

The decision to start opening “personal touch businesses” this soon could undo all the progress to flatten the curve that social distancing has made, said Jane Nelson, chief executive officer of the Oklahoma Nurses Association, which represents 50,000 registered nurses.

“Our underlying concern about opening up is how transferable the virus is,” Nelson said. “We don’t have enough information to ramp up. We have not hit the surge. We haven’t even hit the date for the surge.”

April 30 is the projected peak day in Oklahoma for hospitalizations of acute COVID-19 patients, according to the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle.

Nelson said the decision to start reopening businesses seems to be based more on the expiration of Stitt’s 30-day executive order declaring a state health emergency than on scientific reasoning.

She said she hears from some nurses that they’re instructed to reuse personal protective masks because hospital administrators don’t know if they have enough.

On Stitt’s allowing businesses to open, Nelson said, “We haven’t even begun to see the effects of the elective surgeries.”

Stitt said in mid-April that he would start lifting a moratorium on elective surgeries beginning April 24.