Starting Thursday, Oregon health care workers will no long have to be vaccinated against COVID-19. People infected with COVID-19 will no longer be asked to isolate five days, among other changes.

Oregon is lifting a host of requirements and recommendations to help curb COVID-19 transmission, state officials said Wednesday.

Starting Thursday, Oregon health care workers will no long have to be vaccinated against COVID-19. People infected with COVID-19 will no longer be asked to isolate five days. Labs won’t have to send COVID-19 test results to the state, and health officials will no longer publish reported case counts.

“Right now disease rates are lower,” state epidemiologist Dr. Dean Sidelinger said at a Wednesday news conference, and “the changes we’re making are reflective of that.”

Many of the changes stem from the expiration at midnight, Thursday, of the federal pandemic state of emergency, the Oregon Health Authority said.

As of the state’s last COVID-19 update, officials have reported nearly 975,000 cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic and 9,544 deaths, among the lowest nationally. Hospitalizations have recently fallen to levels not seen in more than a year, with 143 occupied beds reported May 2. The percent of reported tests coming back positive has mostly stayed below 10% for the last month.

The health authority will continue to publish update death counts, hospitalizations and statewide test positivity each week.

The state will keep some pandemic-era measures in place past Thursday, including the vaccination mandate for educators, which will lift June 17, the last day of school.

Among the most significant changes the state will be grappling with in coming months is a return to pre-pandemic requirements for determining whether people qualify for state-funded health insurance, a process that had been on hold since 2020. That means the state is actively determining eligibility for one in three Oregonians, the Department of Human Services’s eligibility program director, Nathan Singer, said Wednesday.

“This is a historic level of work,” Singer said.