While closures due to the coronavirus continue to sweep across the state, one important task will go on largely unaffected: the 2020 census.
On Wednesday, Census Bureau Director Stevan Dillingham announced in a press release that field operations for the 2020 census will be suspended until April 1 to help slow the spread of coronavirus.
Census field operations include service based enumeration, an operation designed to capture the data of people experiencing homelessness, and mobile questionnaire assistance, essentially census workers who go to high-traffic areas to collect data from people who haven’t already self-responded, and isn’t scheduled to begin until early April.
The mass data collecting agency doesn’t anticipate any major delays in the short term largely due to the fact that the Census Bureau has almost entirely shifted to self-response questionnaires, Census Bureau spokesperson Toby Nelson said.
While the suspension of field work is the most substantial change the bureau has had to make thus far, Nelson said even with the suspension, 95 percent of Americans would have been contacted by mail as of now.
“The census has never really been dependent on large public gatherings,” Nelson said. “Since 1970, we have strongly encouraged individuals to self-respond. So in 1970 is when we first modified the census from the traditional method of people knocking on doors to fully transition to a self-response model.”
This year, self-response has been enhanced by the addition of responding via a toll-free number and online response.
Nelson also noted that the Bureau has an internal task force monitoring areas that have experienced acute outbreaks of COVID-19 on a daily basis.
As of Sunday, the Bureau had already received five million questionnaires from households since they started collecting data on March 12, Nelson said.
The closures of census questionnaire assistance centers, like libraries, will also have a relatively small impact on data gathering, Nelson said.
According to 2010 census data, only 75,695 people were assisted at questionnaire assistance centers covering the Seattle Region — comprising Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Alaska and a small portion of Northern California — which accounts for approximately 20 million Americans.
Also, In 2010, there were 23,556 questionnaire assistance centers sponsored by the census bureau nationwide, Nelson said, and of those centers only 14,222 captured and processed data, meaning 9,334 did not capture any data for the census.
If there is anything to be concerned about, it will be when non-response follow-ups, which is when census workers go door-to-door to gather data from those who haven’t self-responded, begins in May.
However, it is hard to tell what precautions will be recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions in six weeks.
“We haven’t made any decision yet because the situation is fluid and is evolving and we don’t want to pull the trigger on anything at this time when we have so far to go until those non-response follow-ups,” Nelson said.
In 2010, the census bureau saw a participation rate in Lewis County of 74 percent — right on par with the national average, Nelson said — but just two percentage points under Washington’s 2010 average.
