March Referrals and my thoughts on the wait

Ok, first and foremost, here is the latest from the CCAA, NOT news to any of you in the Chinese Adoption world, but definitely news to our family and friends. The CCAA (see graphics on the right) has completed the referrals of all families registered through October 24, 2005.

A big congrats to all the families receiving this incredible news. We wish you well.

The CCAA has also completed reviewing all Dossiers through the end of March of 2006. This is waaaay cool as it's probably 100% likely that our Dossier is being reviewed by someone in the review room. If there are any questions we'll be contacted through our US agency. If there are no questions, our file goes back on a shelf and sits and waits in the grey area between the review room and the matching room.

For family and friends, I've received some great questions and I'll answer them this week:

Who is this CCAA?
What is the Review Room?
What is the Matching Room?
How do these 'rooms' work?

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And now onto my thoughts of the recent batch of referrals.

At first glance, I agree with EVERYONE who thinks the amount of days matched seems pretty darn small. I mean, they matched "11 days" within a 30 or so day period. It seems much smaller than recent months where they've matched 15-18 days in the same time period, which sucked less.

So I did my normal data crunching, looking at things the same old way and no matter how you sliced it, the wait continues to climb, this was obvious though without putting pen to paper. But I started to think, for this month, to say they matched 11 days of referrals in a 30 day period in which they matched families isn't really accurate. I mean out of those 11 days, really only 7 of those 11 days had Log in Dates (LIDs), cause 4 of them were weekends. So they matched 7 days of LID's over 30 days.

But wait, of those 30 days, a bunch were weekends and 5 days they were closed for holidays. So they essentially matched 7 days of waiting families in a 17 day period. And then add into the equation that they also matched some agencies families all the way to 10/31 and things look a bit brighter, in fact, much brighter.

Ok, yeah, so? Well, I decided to look, out of curiousity only, at how many TRUE LIDs (excluding weekends where families weren't Logged In) were referred in the number of business days they matched during, again, excluding weekends and holidays. And what I found out was incredibly striking.

Look at the chart to the right.

For each referral period, of roughly a "calendar" month, they matched nearly the SAME ratio of LID's to business days for each of the last 6 months and for the previous 4 months they matched just 10% less.

What's VERY striking to me is that this makes what's going on right now appear STABLE. Yeah, I know, I blogged about a month or two ago about how unstable things seem because the wait keeps rising. So what my chart shows is that it's rising at the same rate every month and also that it seems way way too great a coincidence the flatness of the graph, what are the odds that for the last 6 months the ratio of LID's to business days of matching are nearly identical?

Perhaps, there is some method to the madness. Sure, I"m NOT saying the wait will slow, rather, what I'm saying/showing, is that the wait is increasing in a stable manner and the last change occured 6 months back. My prediction, is that when it shifts downward it will do so in a very controlled manner. I think none of the chart is a coincidence.

Yeah, I know, there's this whole theory that not all LID's are created equal, some LIDs and some months are monsters for the shear volume of Dossiers logged in, but I think the chart above should really make us all think about if it's the Monster months causing the slow down of if perhaps it's more deliberate and controlled.

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My prediction:

If the process continues to average a similar pattern to where it is now, a referral in 13 months. (april)

If the process speeds up by 10% (that's just an extra 1.5 LID's completed each referral cycle) then a referral in March.

If the process speeds up by 20% (moving from an average of 15 to 18 LIDs completed each referral period) then a referral in Feb.

If the process speeds up by 30% (from an average of 15 to 19.5 LIDs completed each referral period), then a referral in Dec/Jan.

All in all, yeah, a year is a long time, but it's not so bad folks. We can do this, we can't wait to meet Magpie.