Firstly, many thanks to those of you that spent your own precious time in scraping the data over the last few days – some of you are doing an amazing selfless task and I am delighted to respond to those people who put in that effort.

The data has a story to tell – so feel free to go and take a look at the data as published on Xarthisius’ site, here –
https://dvcharts.xarthisius.xyz/ceacFY19.html

Now – it should be very obvious to anyone that has been paying attention that the new document procedure has had a heavy impact. The data shows exactly that impact. As of the latest CEAC data, here are the numbers. Pay particular attention to the Issued, AP, Refused and Ready numbers.

And then contract those numbers with numbers from DV2018 – here:

We can see that we are far behind in issued, refused and AP, and the DV2019 Ready numbers are slightly behind DV2018 also. It is true to say that EU in DV2018 was unusually ahead, but even so the 13500 visas we see issued at this point is not enough. Put simply, not enough interviews have been held, and not enough are scheduled. That is because of the new document procedure.

NONE of the regions are close to the quotas, and all regions (apart from AF perhaps) are pretty well advanced in terms of VB pace.

So – what does that mean. Well for some months now, people will have noticed I have been separating what is “mathematically” possible from what is “logistically” possible. And that is the story that the CEAC data is now showing clearly. There are 6 months left of interviews (4 VBs) and in that time they could issue around 36000 visas – a pace of 6000 per month. BUT that is significantly faster than progress to this point and each month they fail to hit that 6k figure will make the goal harder to reach. Now – there is NO LAW that says they MUST issue all the visas, but I have seen months of over 6000 issued visas (in previous years), but if they stick with the current plan, they won’t get close to filling the quotas.

I have recently expressed this as two possible scenarios as follows:

A) *IF* KCC change the process that is causing the backlog (which I suspect they are doing, but cannot be certain) then the backlog cases will take the majority of the available interviews and the VB number would not need to increase rapidly.
B) HOWEVER, if they continue with the process as is (that causes cases to be in backlog because they have not submitted documents) then KCC will have to increase the VB number rapidly and even go current in order to fill the interview slots.

So will it be scenario A or B – I HAVE NO IDEA!!! So, for that, the best idea is “Wait and see”. It is NOT POSSIBLE to look at this as anything mathematically predictable anymore – so please don’t ask for my predictions. I don’t have any. All we can do is watch and see what they do with the VB, with interviews and see how fast the visas issued count can rise.