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March 20, 2020 01:00 pm

Coronavirus Disruption Risks Damaging the 2020 United States Census

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economist: When the 2020 United States census, scheduled for April 1st, was planned, the areas of most concern were mapped. They include places like Deep East Texas, an area of 10,000 square miles north-east of Houston with a population of roughly 385,000 people. In large parts of the region most people do not have internet access. Many live in places only accessible with four-wheel drives. Counting everybody in Deep East Texas was never going to be easy. Now it looks like it may be near impossible. "The coronavirus has certainly complicated matters," says Lonnie Hunt, the director of the Deep East Texas Council of Governments (detcog), an intergovernmental agency. To help ensure an accurate count, detcog had hired a dozen census coordinators to go out to community events -- sports matches, church services, school sports days -- with information to persuade people to send their returns in, and internet hotspots and iPads with which to do it on the spot. Most of those events are now being cancelled. With people staying indoors, they probably will not encounter any of the workers meant to explain to them the importance of the census and get them to fill it in. The virus may represent the biggest threat to the United States census in its 230-year history. So far the Census Bureau has only made modest changes. On March 18th the agency announced that all field operations are to be suspended until April 1st. On other surveys officials will make phone calls instead of visits. It has asked administrators of "group quarters" -- institutions like nursing homes, prisons and college dormitories -- to "choose a way to count their residents that requires less in-person contact." But more radical adjustments may be needed. Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former director of the House committee that oversees the census, notes that the count takes ten years to plan, and "yet now the Census Bureau is being forced to make shifts basically on the fly." On March 17th Brazil announced it would delay its census by a year. American officials might have to consider that, too.

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