I used to be one of the more active mods in the queues. When I went on my 1.5 week vacation, my binding vote was lost and thus many posts in the CV queues stayed there.
At the same time, it seems that the others withdrew a bit more from CVing. We've always tried to "wait for a couple of CVs to trickle in"; nothing new in that.
I don't think that there was any communication on this; it was more of a coincidence. I was away for that time, and one other mod was also quite busy. That may be enough to account for the jump of the queue to 40 when I got back.
Anyway, after coming back I noticed that there had been quite a few community closes and a bunch of 4 vote qs as well. Which is quite good, I hadn't expected that. So I continued to ignore the CV queue. I would visit it now and then to take out a few questions, and I would sometimes act on some flags. But that's it.
I think the other mods looked at it in the same manner.
This wasn't really a communicated decision of the mods. If necessary, I don't have an issue with returning to the queue. I already am keeping it at a manageable level and completing 4-community-vote closes.
Since this wasn't a communicated decision, "how long" isn't really known. It would be good to see how many community closes we can get in another week, IMO. If questions are taking less than a day to get community closed, then we may not need to actively VTC at all.
Again, if the community really feels that we should just actively close everything that needs to be, I personally don't mind doing it. Just that it will be harder to scale as the site grows.
Remember, it's a mods job to handle what the community can't. On most sites, closing is not done by mods, it is instead (mostly) done by the community. If we can get there, the mod can then focus on more important things.
And yes, we're still here. Doing various things -- there are other things to deal with than closing.