On the "
Passport operations in response to COVID-19" page, where the table of stats is posted, there is a new footnote:
*In prior years, the average number of passport applications in process during our busy season has routinely exceeded 1 million.
Well, OK, so what? What it does not say is how many passports were processed each summer week in past years. Same backlog but slower processing means longer wait.
Currently they are processing about 200,000 per week. How can one look up how many were processed per week in Aug 2019?
(I did look at the annual stats, and for fiscal 2019 divided by 52 weeks it comes out to about 350,000 per week, i.e. almost twice the speed as this year. So passport issuance should take approximately twice as long this year as last year.)