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N EW HAM PSH I R E B USI N ESS R EVI EW
COVER STORY
NORTH COUNTRY
LAKES REGION
As NH slowly emerges from shutdown, not every business and not all customers are ready to follow
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N H B R.C O M
A man walks past empty parking spaces while visiting the Mall of New Hampshire in Manchester on May 11, the first day some New Hampshire retail locations, including larger shopping plazas, reopened. (AP Photo/ Charles Krupa)
If you let them, will they reopen?
NASHUA REGION
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ew Hampshire and the nation have never had the economy shut down so suddenly. And they have never tried to reopen it once it did, with the threat of a continuing pandemic dangling over each move. The pressure to open from cash-strapped businesses and cabin-fevered consumers is immense, despite the federal government flooding the state with billions of dollars in economic aid and despite a still-rising coronavirus caseload and death toll — a death toll that, in mid-May (only two months after the shutdown), stood at nearly half the number of opioid-related fatalities recorded in all of 2019. Of course, testing has risen dramatically, and the percentage of those testing positive has declined from 10% at the beginning of May to under 5% by the middle of the month. Yet, even as New Hampshire took its first steps — “not big steps but small steps” as Gov. Chris Sununu put it — in allowing some businesses to open their doors, not every business is ready to, and not many customers are running through them, even with their masks on. “We are really bipolar on this reopening,” said economist Russ Thibeault, president of Applied Economic Research. “We are dying to get out, but afraid to get sick.” After all, the very order to reopen the economy is called Stay at Home 2.0. How well will business do, if everyone actually did stay at home? The New Hampshire economy started tentatively rebooting during the first week of May, when Sununu’s reopening order began with input from his hand-picked Economic Reopening Task Force. But that first week was more about placing restrictions on what was already open — essential businesses like manufacturing — or on what would have opened anyway,
like campgrounds and state parks. The order did lift restrictions on “time-sensitive” healthcare services.
Cautious hospitals But most hospitals geared up cautiously, not just because of concerns of spreading the virus but of insuring they had the resources to be able to treat it. This was especially true of Catholic Medical Center in Manchester, which as of May 13 was treating 30 confirmed coronavirus patients — the most in the state — 47 if you count those with symptoms who were awaiting testing. It couldn’t open an intensive care unit because of this, which is why it can only “turn the dimmer switch ever so slightly each week,” said Alex Walker, CMC’s executive vice president and chief executive operating officer. The number of elective procedures “fell off the cliff” after March 5, he said, and the hospital is now losing about $20 million. It’s true there has been a lot of federal aid announced for the hospitals, but so far, CMC has only seen about $8.5 million of that “without strings attached,” not even covering March’s losses. The hospital didn’t qualify for federal hot spot funding reserved for urban centers like New York and Boston, nor rural hospital funding because it was too urban, he said. “We don’t get a nickel,” he said. “How crazy is that?” Slowly bringing back some elective procedure “will certainly help offset some of the losses we were sustaining [but] our financial situation is very, very concerning.” Medical offices had a similar experience. Concord Eye Center, for instance, lost about half of its business and had to furlough half the staff when it stopped offering routine care, but it is now up to 75% of business, bringing back services like cataract surgery.
Thanks to the federal Paycheck Protection Program, it will be able to keep going until June, “but we really need to see real money hit the books in July,” said Concord Eye President Dr. Eliot Foley.
‘Living in different times’ The week of May 11 was the first real week of reopening, with limited OKs given to retail stores, hair salons, drive-in theaters and golf courses. Though the golf course parking lots were full, many cars were not empty. Customers had to sit in them to wait for their tee time, now stretched to 12 minutes between times from the previous eight.
Cosmetology Association, representing the 30,000 state licensees, had argued that salons should be reopened, “because people are getting desperate. Everybody is looking a bit shaggy.” And while reopening guidelines might be strict, “that’s how it works, we are living in different times.” When the guidelines came out, a number of salons balked, either saying that it was still unsafe or they couldn’t make money on services limited to haircuts and single color touch-ups. But the demand was there. David Bellman, owner of Bellman Jewelers in Manchester, had opened up a penthouse barber shop upstairs from his Elm Street storefront a few
Slowly bringing back some elective procedures ‘will certainly help offset some of the losses we were sustaining,’ but, Alex Walker, executive vice president of Catholic Center, says the Manchester hospital’s ‘financial situation is very, very concerning.’ “It was so slow motion,” complained Peter Harrity, owner of the Candia Woods Golf Links and The Oaks Golf Course. “We are busy as we can be at 68%.” Can the courses make money under these conditions? “Of course not,” he said. “We are underwater every day.” Hairdressers are another mixed bag. Pam New, president of the New Hampshire
years back, and when it announced reopening, “you could watch the reservations fill up online, booked solid all week. They were going to be crazy busy.” Bellman wished they were lining up outside his store as well, but pent-up demand for wedding rings isn’t as great. Bellman’s never fully closed. Since the store buys jewelry as well as sells it, it has a pawnbroker’s license, and pawnbrokers are deemed es-
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