Coronavirus Is the Last Thing the U.S. Census Needed
Census workers were supposed to be in the field now. It could be months before they can knock on doors.
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The 2020 U.S. census has been mired in controversies, from the eventually struck-down citizenship question to staffing problems. But in the end, it was an unexpected hurdle — the Covid-19 pandemic — that posed the most serious threat to the census’ success.
Will more people fill out their census online because they’re stuck home with nothing better to do? Or will the inability of census workers to knock on doors drastically affect the population count for this decade? To find out, GEN called Andrew Whitby, author of a sweeping new book about the global history of censuses called The Sum of the People.
GEN: Bottom line up front: How does the Covid-19 pandemic affect the 2020 U.S. census?
Andrew Whitby: It delays it is the simple answer. There are really two parts of the census to think about: There’s the part that is conducted without any personal contact, which started in the middle of March and has been ongoing. That’s mostly focused on internet response — that’s the mailings people have been getting saying, “Go online and reply.” Any people who haven’t replied yet will be getting a mailing that has a paper form they can fill out, or they can respond by telephone. And all of that is going ahead close to what was planned, and that should capture about 60% of the households that the Census Bureau targets. That part’s not affected.
The rest of it is partly people who live in remote areas — certain parts of Maine, Alaska, Native American communities — and partly people who don’t respond on the internet, by telephone, or by mail. The Census Bureau [usually] sends people called enumerators out a little bit after Census Day, the first of April, to knock on doors and try to get those census responses. That part is on hold. It was delayed first for two weeks, and then for another two weeks, and now it’s on the order of months. That affects when they would initially report the actual figures to the president and then a later set of figures that would be used for redistricting.
