Colorado health officials will close 40 community COVID-19 testing sites by the end of April, leaving 80 more open amid a broader effort by the state to transition pandemic response into the traditional health care system.

State leaders, including Gov. Jared Polis, have said for weeks that they’re going to get out of the business of running Colorado’s COVID-19 response, now that the pandemic has slowed significantly. The closing of 40 testing sites follows the ending of large-scale vaccination clinics last month, which had been a mainstay of inoculation distribution. 

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The 80 remaining sites have the capacity to conduct 26,000 tests per day, the state health department said Wednesday in a news release. The current demand is fewer than 2,500 tests per day. The agency said it would take two to four weeks to remobilize its drive-thru testing sites and mobile vans and that it has a stockpile of more than a million rapid tests that can be distributed to the community.

“We took careful consideration of community needs and capacity demand in determining the schedule of site closures,” Emily Travanty, the health department’s laboratory director, said in a statement. “We considered equity, site traffic and strategic location when determining the 80 sites that remain open. Now is an appropriate time to begin this gradual transition as we continue to see a plateau in case rates in Colorado, and decreased demand for community testing.”

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With the state stepping away, the burden of testing, diagnosing, treating and vaccinating against COVID-19 will fall upon individual medical providers and health systems. The state has likened it to how influenza and other diseases are handled; Scott Bookman, the state’s COVID-19 incident commander, has said it’s “not normal” to be vaccinated or tested in a parking lot. 

COVID-19 cases in Colorado have fallen dramatically from their late fall and early winter highs. State experts projected that as much as 90% of the state had immunity against infection from omicron in March, and the percentage was even higher against severe disease. That’s allowed nearly all pandemic-related mitigation measures to end and for Polis to advance a plan to move the pandemic response into the broader fabric of Colorado health care.

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