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As I mentioned in yesterday’s Projections post, the CCCWA seems to be holding fairly steady with their average number of LID’s per month, when computed over the past five or six years. Month to month it’s drastically different, but when viewed longer term, it’s been between three and six days, on average, for six years — and if you average all six years you end up with 4.8 days per month.
We’ve done this exercise (below) a few times before, but it seems it’s timely to do it again, after yesterday’s discussion of LID’s per month and year.
I believe the best predictor for those who are within one to five months of a referral is still the polls. Only by knowing which days are heavy and which are light do I think we can come close with a short term prediction.
However, for those who are more than five or six months away from a referral, I believe days referred per month is probably fairly accurate, or as accurate as we’re likely to get for a long term projection. It doesn’t work if you’re close because log-in-days aren’t uniform for number logged in per day.
Which brings us to the actual exercise. In the table below, the numbers in the column headers represent the number of days you believe the CCCWA will refer per month, on average. The labels in the first column represent the month referrals will arrive. The dates populating the table represent the LID cut off for that month based on the average number of days in the column’s header. If your date is greyed out you should probably use the Projection charts, not this exercise. Assuming the CCCWA keeps to a similar number of babies referred per month.
To use the chart you need to decide how many days you think the CCCWA will refer per month on average between now and your referral, and then go down that column until you find your LID (or the date most immediately after your LID, as the dates represent cut-off-dates). Once you have your date, look to the left and see when your referral will arrive if the CCCWA does indeed average that number of days per month.
The blue highlighted cells show the cut-off dates if your LID is 12/8/06. For eight day batches the cut-off would be close to September of this year, while six day batches would mean something closer to November.
If your LID is 4/1/07 then average eight day batches would mean a referral in the vicinity of November 2014, while six day batches would push you to June of 2015.

Which column should you use? That’s the question, isn’t it? As attrition takes more and more people from the program, at some point you’d think the numbers have to go up. We’ve seen them raise a little, but logic tells me the near future should begin to show significant raises in LID’s per month and year. Unfortunately, as the CCCWA decreases the number of babies allowed into the international program each year, there are no guarantees the average will climb.
One final note on the graphic above: The red font cells show when the wait will reach ten years.
It’s possible attrition will mount until we begin to see two weeks of LID’s per month before we hit the ten year mark, but unless the CCCWA begins to refer at least a month of LID’s every month, it will eventually happen. We heard the wait would never reach two years, then it would never reach three years, then five years. We’re nearing the six and a half year point, does anyone really want to insist the wait will never reach ten years?
Too many times we’ve seen the poll numbers drop dramatically, and assumed the CCAA/CCCWA would be able to refer more LID’s per batch, only to see them drastically drop the number of babies referred.
The coming months don’t represent a dramatic jump, but only time will tell whether the CCCWA will keep the number of babies referred per month at the same level, or the log-in-days referred per batch the same.
I want to be clear that we have two very defined paths, plus an unknown number of paths the CCCWA could take that we can’t see. I’m concentrating on the two paths we can see, and trying to give you a snapshot of what those two trajectories could look like, depending on what the CCCWA is using as a constant. Logic would tell us the number of babies available would be the defining factor, but so far it appears to be a combination: LID’s per day and thus babies per month, with an eye towards what the average LID’s per month will be at the end of the year.
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