COVID-19 testing soon will look different for Summit County, as county officials are working to secure new locations for sites in Silverthorne and Frisco.

Summit County Emergency Management Director Brian Bovaird said both the state testing site in Silverthorne and the Centura Health testing site in Frisco are in buildings that are set to be demolished in April.

The two planned demolitions and a change of ownership at the Silverthorne site have county officials working through a logistics puzzle to find the best solution.

Bovaird said the public likely won’t see any changes to the Silverthorne site for the next month or so. The site, which is in a warehouse building on Center Circle and owned by CenturyLink, is being sold to a developer and eventually will be turned into housing.

In the past few weeks, Bovaird and his team have been drafting a use agreement with the new owners to establish testing at the site up until April 15, when the demolition is scheduled. While the agreement has not yet been signed, Bovaird said the new owners verbally have agreed to keep the site for testing until the demolition date.

Bovaird was unable to share the name of the new owners as the sale is not yet complete.

“Right now, we are working on identifying an alternate location for that,” he said. “As far as right now, (the public) won’t see any difference with that building.”

The county would like to see the state testing site continue to be drive-thru because the state health officials who run it can perform about 450 tests per day in the drive-thru format. If the site were to move indoors, they would be able to do only around 200 tests per day, Bovaird said at a Board of Health meeting Feb. 18.

The Centura Health site, which operates out of the Vista Professional Building on School Road in Frisco, was set to be demolished in November, Bovaird said. However, Centura decided to delay the demolition to help provide testing to the community.

Starting April 1, that testing site will be moved to the Summit County Community and Senior Center, 83 Nancy’s Place in Frisco, Bovaird said.

The new location will still be run by Centura Health and will operate as a drive-thru testing site. People will be able to make appointments in the same way they did before, by calling 970-668-5584 to receive a referral.

Once demolished, Centura will get to work on building a workforce housing development on the Vista Professional Building lot.

At the Feb. 18 meeting, Summit County Commissioner Josh Blanchard asked whether the new site will pose any traffic concerns. The senior center parking is currently used as an area for people to monitor their symptoms for an allergic reaction after receiving the vaccine at one of the county’s drive-thru vaccine clinics, which are located up the road at the county bus barn.

Bovaird said he doesn’t expect any major traffic concerns because Centura Health operates on an appointment basis, so only one car should be at the senior center at a time for testing.

Additionally, the county is prepared to use some of its parking at the County Commons as overflow, he said.

“We’ve done walkthroughs in that building with Aaron Parmet, the epidemiologist for St. Anthony Summit Medical Center, to make sure all the precautions are taken in that building,” he said.

The Vail Health testing site, at the old Speakeasy Movie Theater in Breckenridge, has no planned changes in the foreseeable future.

Although the two demolitions will cause some changes, county officials are committed to keeping the testing sites in Summit County.

“It’s interesting that both of those sites are being demolished at right about the same time,” Commissioner Elisabeth Lawrence said at the Feb. 18 meeting. “But thank goodness we’ve had them to use in the first place.”