Wash­ing­ton State is inch­ing clos­er to the mile­stone of hav­ing sev­en­ty per­cent of all peo­ple ages six­teen and old­er vac­ci­nat­ed against COVID-19, Gov­er­nor Jay Inslee announced at a news con­fer­ence yes­ter­day.

“We’ve had con­sid­er­able suc­cess and vac­ci­na­tion and we are now close to being able to essen­tial­ly ful­ly reopen our state,” said Inslee.

“We’ve had sub­stan­tial reduc­tion in the risk to peo­ple who have had this vac­cine. We have saved hun­dreds and thou­sands of lives and it is a great joy to know that thou­sands now have a huge fac­tor to save their lives with this vaccine.”

As of press time, 7,301,374 vac­cine does had been admin­is­tered in Wash­ing­ton State, with 3,443,407 peo­ple ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed and 3,925,186 peo­ple hav­ing ini­ti­at­ed vac­ci­na­tion, accord­ing to the DOH vac­cine progress track­er.

“More than two thirds of our peo­ple in our state have ini­ti­at­ed their vac­ci­na­tions,” Gov­er­nor Inslee not­ed at his press con­fer­ence, call­ing out Seat­tle for hav­ing already sur­passed the sev­en­ty per­cent mile­stone ahead of the state as a whole.

Our pub­lic opin­ion research cor­rob­o­rates Wash­ing­ton State’s offi­cial data.

In our most recent statewide poll of like­ly 2022 vot­ers, con­duct­ed over two weeks ago for us by Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Polling, 63% of respon­dents said that they had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vac­cine, while 37% had not.

Here’s the exact ques­tion we asked, and the responses:

QUESTION: Have you per­son­al­ly received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vac­cine, or not?

ANSWERS:

• Yes (have received a dose): 63%
• No (have not received a dose): 37%

The uni­verse for our poll was, of course, like­ly 2022 vot­ers, not Wash­ing­ton’s six­teen plus pop­u­la­tion as a whole. Still, giv­en that Wash­ing­ton has auto­mat­ic vot­er reg­is­tra­tion and tends to vote at high­er per­cent­ages than oth­er parts of the coun­try, we fig­ured we might see a cor­re­la­tion in our data. And indeed, we did.

A visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of our COVID-19 vac­ci­na­tion poll finding

Our sur­vey of 992 like­ly 2022 Wash­ing­ton State vot­ers was in the field pri­or to Memo­r­i­al Day, from Tues­day, May 25th through Wednes­day, May 26th, 2021.

(As men­tioned, over two weeks have elapsed since this poll was in the field. Offi­cial vac­ci­na­tion fig­ures were low­er then than they are now.)

The poll uti­lizes a blend­ed method­ol­o­gy, with auto­mat­ed phone calls to land­lines (50%) and text mes­sage answers from cell phone only respon­dents (50%).

It was con­duct­ed by Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Polling for the North­west Pro­gres­sive Insti­tute, and has a mar­gin of error of +/- 3.1% at the 95% con­fi­dence interval.

It was only a few weeks ago that get­ting a COVID-19 vac­cine required some resource­ful­ness. Now, thank­ful­ly, the vac­cines are wide­ly available.

With the low hang­ing fruit hav­ing been metaphor­i­cal­ly plucked, Wash­ing­ton State’s elect­ed and pub­lic health offi­cials have been try­ing to keep the momen­tum going by com­ing up with new incen­tives to get the pop­u­la­tion vaccinated.

These mea­sures include a recent­ly announced lot­tery (Shot of a Life­time) that includes cash prizes and oth­er give­aways. Any­one who has already been vac­ci­nat­ed is sup­posed to have already been entered to win in the lottery.

If you’d like to check to see if you’re in the sys­tem, you can do so here.

As Gov­er­nor Inslee men­tioned, the data clear­ly shows that near­ly all the peo­ple who are get­ting hos­pi­tal­ized with COVID-19 in Wash­ing­ton are unvac­ci­nat­ed. Pro­tect your­self, your fam­i­ly, your friends, your col­leagues, and your com­mu­ni­ty from this hor­ri­ble dis­ease by get­ting vac­ci­nat­ed today if you haven’t already.