The 2020 Census: How Coronavirus Has Affected It

But the coronavirus has upended huge parts of that campaign, which envisioned crowded public events centered on the census. Promise Neighborhoods, an Allentown, Pa., group, had to

scrap a local basketball tournament that would have drawn hundreds. Chicago is setting up 100 computer kiosks for online census work at gathering points, but pandemic-spooked residents are not gathering to use them. Detroit census organizers canceled 90 public events that were supposed to promote the head count.

Unable to draw crowds or even to knock on doors, census supporters are improvising new ways to drum up response. Detroit plans to enlist 600 neighborhood block groups that will compete to achieve the highest census response. One California group has abandoned its door-to-door campaign and is instead handing out census information at places like food banks. State and local campaigns everywhere have ramped up social media advertising. In Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, a campaign is targeting Hispanic households that are traditionally hard to count by inserting Spanish-language ads in Facebook videos that are reached via Spanish internet addresses.

How does the census count those who don’t respond?

The Census Bureau has not completely figured that out. The bureau had planned to dispatch hundreds of thousands of census takers to track down tens of millions of households and individuals who fail to respond. The plan was to record their answers to the census questions on specially equipped iPhones. Whether and how that happens depends on if the pandemic ebbs sufficiently to make that sort of door-knocking safe.

Experts say much of that work may be able to be conducted fairly safely, in front-porch interviews that do not require a census taker to enter a household. One unanswered question is whether households that have already ignored repeated requests to fill out the census will even open their doors to strangers in the midst of an epidemic.

The bureau has extended the final deadline for finishing the count by two weeks, to mid-August. Officials say a further extension has not been ruled out — but the further it gets from the publicity of census day, the less likely people are to consider filling out the form, experts say.

When does the census process end and how confident are experts that the count will be accurate?

Federal law requires the bureau to deliver population totals to the president by Dec. 31; the states will use those totals to reapportion political districts in 2021. But how accurate those totals will be is anything but easy to say.

In 2010, more than 98 percent of households that were sent census forms were tallied by the count’s end — an impressive accomplishment. But the census missed households the bureau did not know existed, some households failed to report everyone who lived there, and not all population groups were counted equally. By the bureau’s own count, the 2010 count missed 16 million people, double-counted 8.5 million and counted another 1.5 million either by mistake or in the wrong place. Minorities and young children were undercounted; non-Hispanic whites were overcounted.