Colorado has deactivated its crisis standards for both hospital staffing and emergency services Thursday in a further sign that the state is extricating itself from months of COVID-19 surges.

Both measures loosened guidance for ambulances and hospitals at a time when COVID-19 was surging and disrupting critical parts of Colorado’s health infrastructure. The hospital staffing crisis standards were activated in November, when the delta surge was straining hospitals and staffing shortages were at their worst point of the pandemic. The state activated the ambulance services standards in January, when the omicron wave was infecting so many people that emergency providers were short-staffed.

Their deactivation comes as the state continues to exhale after months of surging COVID-19 cases fueled first by the delta variant and then omicron. After delta sent hospitals to the brink of being overwhelmed, omicron pushed case and positivity rates to their highest points of the pandemic. 

But both have since subsided. Hospitalizations are down to their lowest levels since August, as are the number of cases being reported daily. State officials and experts have said that omicron infected so many people that roughly 80% of the population will be immune this month.

Under the crisis standards, hospitals were able to move providers into positions outside of their normal roles, and it increased the number of patients staff members could see. The emergency service activation allowed ambulances to decide which patients needed to be transported to the hospital and which could self-report or could seek services elsewhere.

“The decision to deactivate these standards is based on recent modeling and steadily declining cases and hospitalizations, suggesting the immediate strain COVID-19 places on Colorado should continue to decrease in the coming weeks,” Eric France, Colorado’s chief medical officer who has the authority to institute or deactivate the crisis standards, said in a statement. “We recognize that health care systems continue to face challenges due to chronic staffing issues across the economy, and we thank health care workers for their service protecting Coloradans throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Notably, the state never activated its worst-case scenario crisis standards, which would have given hospitals guidance on which patients to treat and which to refer elsewhere or to discharge. Some providers asked the state to do so, and some systems – like UCHealth – enacted their own version of the standards, but Gov. Jared Polis and France never did so. 

While the change in crisis standards for hospital staffing marks a change in the pandemic situation, hospitals continue to face critical shortages of workers. That’s going to be a long-term problem that the state and hospital leaders will have to address: Pandemic-driven burnout and exhaustion helped push as many as 20% of the United States’ health workforce out of the industry since March 2020.