By the way - any thoughts about the numbers? I'm sure you are crunching as I type!
First of all, thank you very much for the awesome work you're doing. The numbers are indeed a fine piece of information. But they are not as easy to use as I hoped, if you want to predict a September cut-off. So I think you scared the OC folks a little too early.
The "At NVC" status consists of different types of cases: people not following up on their selection with an application, AoS cases and CP cases not being current. The first of these gives me quite a headache. So let's look at what we can say for now and speculate afterwards.
We have 4,968 visas issued in Q1 and the density of the scheduled cases is crazily low. Oh boy, there is really a tremendous backlog at KCC's. They should have issued 10k+ visas in Q1, since 9 FAM 42.51 PN1 states that
The monthly allotment of IV numbers is close to the maximum permissible.
So in Q1 we should have seen some 27 percent of the total number of visas made available in the DV category. In the near future we will see a steady increase of the CP density. Then it will stay stationary for low case numbers, meaning that the KCC have cleared the backlog. And by the way, I don't expect a slow down of the VB progression for the next two months.
For a prediction of the September cut-off for EU region we have basically two options.
Option 1:
Awaiting a stationary CP density in the low case numbers. This makes it possible to give a rather accurate prediction of the September cut-off. This will take some time.
Option 2:
Entering queasy ground I will try to compare DV-2015 and DV-2014 and speculate on the resulting CP density. We don't have to bother about Ukraine and Uzbekistan because these two countries are limited to the low case numbers. So I am interested in the Rest of Europe only.
In 2015 we have 4,613 RoE selectees less than in 2014. So I wondered what the max case number would be w/o this reduction. 2013 Entrants Statistics shows an demographic factor of 1.866 for RoE, so we have a difference of 4,613/1.866 = 2,472 cases. The average density of case numbers greater than 18,000 in CEAC 2015 is 0.366 and so we get a change of 2,472/0.366 = 6,754 in case numbers.
The largest case number I found is cardiogenics 2015EU455##. So w/o the reduction we would have 45,500+6,754 = 52,254 as a lower bound for the max case number in DV-2015. Looking for the max case number in DV-2014 I found 2014EU52### in this forum and this fits into the 2015 pattern. So I doubt there is much of a change in the density underpinning the DV program, and the max case number of 45,006 is far from shocking. To have some margin I will work with a moderately increased density later on. Now for the September cut-off.
Looking up the ratio of issued visas to the number of selectees for the past two years, one observes for Ukraine and Uzbekistan values of less than 0.30 and 0.70 respectively. The two special countries will take approximately 4,679*0.30+4,365*0.70 = 4,460, so no more than 4,500 visas.
Assuming 51,500 available visas and a quota of 37.5 percent for Europe there are 51,500*0.375-4,500 = 14,813 visas for RoE, and with an average CP/AoS split of 95.5/4.5 over the past five years 14,813*.955 = 14,146 of these are CP visas.
CEAC 2014 shows for case numbers greater than 20,000 a density of 15.5 percent for successful cases with an average number of 2.11 visas per case, so we have a density of issued visas of 0.155*2.11 = 0.327. I work with 0.34 for an increased density (by 4 percent). This results in a September cut-off of 14,146/0.34 = 41,600.
If we have a quota of 38 percent and 52,500 available visas, the same calculations give a September cut-off at 43,400. If there's no increase in density (or response ratio) it could even be a bit higher.
Final word of warning: This was guesswork not a prediction.
Happy New Year to you all