For weeks, Ward 8 residents have been raising the alarm about a problem they say has gotten profoundly worse amid the city’s coronavirus outbreak: They aren’t getting their mail.

“There have been a couple of days where we didn’t get any type of mail drop-off at all. We never saw the mail person,” says Amanda Greene Bouza, a Congress Heights resident for the last nine years. “We had another situation where we were told packages arrived, and they didn’t arrive. We called the company we purchased from, and they resent it. Two weeks later, the original order showed up on our porch.”

Greene Bouza’s complaints mirror dozens of others made on the Original Great Ward 8 Facebook page. One post about a lack of mail service from April 27 has 83 comments beneath it. “I’m a resident in Ward 8 and our mail hasn’t been out in over a week,” the post reads. “We keep getting different answers and disrespect from the [post] office workers located at 400 Southern Ave SE … Please help us many are waiting on checks as well.”

The complaints on the post appear to center around the Southern Avenue SE post office. Several commenters describe attempts to contact the office and obtain their mail, both by phone and in person, without success. The comments also describe experiences similar to Greene Bouza’s—packages read online as delivered, when in fact they aren’t. Those packages sometimes eventually show up days later, per the commenters.

The phone number listed online for the Southern Ave. post office does not connect the caller to any employees of this location.

Michael Hotovy, a spokesperson for the U.S. Postal Service, did not directly answer questions about the trouble Ward 8 residents say they have been having getting their mail.

“The Postal Service is committed to provide timely and accurate delivery as it continues to work through the challenges posed by the pandemic,” Hotovy said over email. “Customers with questions about mail deliveries are encouraged to contact the Postal Service by calling 1-800-ASK-USPS, online at https://www.usps.com/help/contact-us.htm, or through Twitter @USPSHelp.”

A second Ward 8 resident, who declined to be named in this article for privacy reasons, said she has also noticed that people dressed in street clothes—not in a mail carrier’s uniform—have sometimes been dropping off her mail. Another USPS spokesperson, Thomas Ouellette, tells DCist that this is normal, because sometimes the organization hires temporary mail carriers to cover shifts.

Rose Williams, a lifelong District resident, says that her household has not received mail since April 15. Williams says that her mail delivery in Ward 8 has always been spotty—she’s noticed that delivery was very light on some days and very heavy on others. Sometimes it has also come as late as 9 p.m., she says.

But since the pandemic hit the city, Williams says she’s noticed her mail service has gotten worse than ever before. She is worried that her son, who is a senior in high school, could miss important communications from universities and organizations offering scholarships because of the long delay in getting mail.

“I know [from talking to neighbors] that this is a Ward 8-wide situation,” she says. “We just get no mail over here.”

Greene Bouza says that she wasn’t sure, at first, that this was a problem for other people in her ward. This has mostly been a frustrating inconvenience for her and her husband, she says, but they’re both worried that they might end up having trouble getting their prescriptions delivered, which would make this a much more serious problem.

“I’m still hopeful that purchases we’ve made are going to arrive here eventually,” she says, “but it’s frustrating because it’s like what is going on?”