Inslee Not Ending Emergency Declaration Any Time Soon

Governor Jay Inslee announced Friday that he has no intention of ending Washington's State of Emergency declaration any time soon.

Inslee identified the need to maintain vaccination efforts, correcting masking issues (especially in the school system), and the need to make a testing regime available as three issues keeping Washington under a State of Emergency.

"My dad is an old track coach. He used to say that you've always got to run through the tape. We're not at the finish line with this by any stretch of the imagination." stated Inslee, "We have to recognize that the conditions do exist that if we don't get these vaccination rates up, we could face an explosion of this because of the Delta variant."

Inslee added that he will end the emergency declaration when his office looks at the dozens of metrics they follow and determine there is no longer a crisis.

The governor declared a State of Emergency back on February 29th, 2020, hours after the first Washington resident died of COVID-19.