WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — A nationwide mail slowdown reported by The Washington Post has been felt in the Upper Valley.

White River Junction resident Fred Lerner said he and other neighbors on Worcester Avenue didn’t receive mail for four days last week, from Tuesday until Saturday.

“The mail delivery has become quite irregular,” Lerner said in an interview Monday, adding that he has called the post office several times and rarely gets through to anyone. During one call, an employee said the office was short-staffed, Lerner said.

“It’s not a matter of incompetence,” Lerner said. “It’s that they are not getting the resources they’re supposed to get to do their job.” 

However, he said the issue was especially concerning amid the holidays and ahead of next year’s tax season. Lerner said he was worried about the reliability of the post office especially when it comes to getting financial documents.

USPS spokesman Steve Doherty did not respond specifically to questions about the White River Junction post office, but he wrote in an email Monday that the postal service has been “at or near” holiday volumes since February.

“In addition to our issues related to record volume and the pandemic, capacity limits with airlifts and trucking and limitations by some of our international counterparts have added to some delivery times,” Doherty wrote.

The postal service has also implemented “liberal” leave policies and encouraged some employees to stay home, meaning that they’ve seen a staffing shortage amid the COVID-19 pandemic, he said. Doherty said that the postal service nationwide had so far seen 27,599 positive COVID-19 cases among its 644,000 employees, or 4.2%.

And a postal service notice emailed to a customer in southern Vermont on Tuesday said it was “experiencing unprecedented volume increases and limited employee availability due to the impacts of COVID-19.” 

In another development, Vermont Secretary of Human Services Mike Smith said during a news conference on Tuesday that two sets of COVID-19 test samples, part of the state’s surveillance testing of school staff, were lost in the mail on the way to Boston. One shipped via United Parcel Service and the other via the postal service, Smith said.