the growing wait for ESD to report ESD's wait times

It has now been more than a month since the last time ESD reported wait times and other similar claims processing data— the department's last report covered data through the week ending December 26, 2020. Key data has not been updated since then. Instead the department's data reporting dashboard simply says "thank you for your patience." 

At the time the department last reported this information, their data showed:

  • only 69.8% of claimants paid within a week

  • 39,613 claimants were waiting from a response from ESD — in a week when only 286,176 claims were paid

  • There was an average 14.3 day wait to pay simple claims

  • There was an average 9.8 week wait to pay more complex claims

Wait times had been growing in the weeks before the data was cutoff, so it seems likely wait times have grown even worse in the past month.

And at this point we have to ask about yet another delay at ESD — what is the expected wait time for the department to report out its own wait times?