WASHINGTON (TND) — The Biden administration’s plan to deliver hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 tests is putting new pressure on the already lagging U.S. Postal Service.
More than 19,000 postal workers are off the job right now because of COVID-19 infections or exposures. That’s just shy of the agency’s all-time high.
People across the country have said that their mail is delayed, with the most recent reports coming from Shreveport, Louisiana and Detroit, Michigan. Some people in Columbus, Ohio say they haven’t received a single piece of mail in two weeks.
USPS has defended its delivery rates, saying the average time it took to deliver a piece of mail in the first week of January was 2.6 days and that its “mitigation plans continue to perform well, enabling the organization to maintain strong service performance scores across all mail categories.”