Looking back over some of the IDPH monthly updates I noticed something interesting.
Until May of this year, the updates indicated how many apps had been approved AND how many had been submitted.
Subtract approved from submitted, and you have the size of the backlog.
As of May, the backlog had slowly but steadily grown over time to around 5000 apps waiting for processing. In June, they stopped reporting the 'apps received' totals, and since then have only reported the 'apps approved' total.
But based on the earlier calculation of an average of 80 apps a day being processed, that would mean the state had an approximately 62.5 day backlog as of May if my math is correct (no guarantees!)
So if all of this calculating and extrapolating is accurate, that would tell us that based on a 90 day average wait time, for 27.5 of those 90 days, each app is just sitting on hold being ignored. Or something like that
Another way of looking at this is that it
should have taken only 62.5 days for an app submitted in May to be processed. Anything over that is not processing time, it's artificially added delay time.