Washington now has capacity to administer 45,000 vaccines a day

Gov. Jay Inslee reported Thursday that the state now has the capacity to administer 45,000 COVID-19 vaccines a day.

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“All we need are the doses,” Inslee said. “But the good news is that as vaccine supplies increase as we hope and believe they will, we now will be ready to get them into arms as quickly as humanly possible.”

Washington currently has 1.7 million people eligible in the current phase of vaccines, which include frontline health care workers and high-risk first responders, long-term care facility residents, those over the age of 65, and those over the age of 50 living in multi-generational households. In total, 770,000 people have been vaccinated statewide.

Inslee reports that the state is receiving between 100,000 and 116,000 doses a week, with roughly 28,000 people getting vaccinated a day. That’s double the 14,000 a day Washington was averaging just two weeks ago, helped along by mass vaccination sites that have opened in recent weeks.

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The hope is that vaccine deliveries will continue to ramp up in the weeks to come, allowing the state to administer the 45,000 doses it currently has the capacity to distribute.

“The source of this problem is fundamentally a lack of vaccine,” Inslee noted. “We believe that is going to increase.”

With the Super Bowl taking place Sunday evening, Inslee and Secretary of Health Dr. Umair Shah also urged Washingtonians to avoid large gatherings, as a means to avoid an uptick of cases as the state continues to ramp up its vaccinations.

“We do not want people to sink back into activities that are going to put people and their loved ones at risk,” Dr. Shah said.

To see if you’re eligible for the vaccine, you can check the Department of Health’s phase finder here. You can see a list of locations distributing doses here.

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