Opting against closures, Gov. Inslee shifts focus to increased COVID testing and boosters
Jan 5, 2022, 2:39 PM | Updated: Jan 6, 2022, 7:35 am
Gov. Inslee announced a handful of mitigation measures Wednesday, designed to combat Washington’s recent rise in COVID-19 cases driven by the omicron variant.
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Speaking during a live press conference, Inslee emphasized that for the time being, there will not be any rollbacks, closures, or additional restrictions, nor will schools be asked to transition back to virtual learning. Rather, the hope is to focus more on expanding access to COVID testing and booster vaccines.
To that end, the state now has 800,000 at-home tests in hand, with “another two million expected this week.” These tests will be made available to the public through schools, as well as local health departments “for distribution to underserved communities,” Gov. Inslee explained. That will come about as part of a partnership with CareEvolution and Amazon “to expand our testing infrastructure and create a web portal so families can order tests directly to their home for no charge.” That portal is expected to launch “within the next couple weeks.”
The Washington State Department of Health will also be looking to make booster shots of the COVID-19 vaccines more widely available through additional “high throughput locations.”
“We increased the capacity of the Auburn FEMA mobile vaccination clinic in King County so they could accommodate thousands more appointments per day,” Inslee said. “That site has tripled its output — it had the capacity to do 500 shots a day, now it is up to capacity for 1,500. In addition, we will be adding another high-throughput site in Northwest Washington the week of January 18.”
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The state plans to distribute upwards of 10 million free masks as well, with Gov. Inslee citing facial coverings as “the best and fastest tools to help us fight the spread in the very near term.”
Masks will be distributed “into local communities, including K-12 schools, in the coming weeks.”
As of early this week, Washington’s seven-day rolling average for daily COVID-19 cases is around 5,800, by far the highest the state has seen over the course of the entire pandemic. Comparatively, that number peaked at 3,600 at the height of the state’s delta variant-driven surge in August 2021.
