Coronavirus turns ‘Census Day’ virtual

In a normal 10-year census, April 1 — Census Day — is a day of nationwide events to promote the population count and get households to fill out their forms. The Philadelphia region had a lot planned, including a rally at LOVE Park.

But this isn’t a normal census. Most residents across the country are confined to their homes. The sporting events, festivals, and block parties at which the Census Bureau, local governments, and community groups planned to get people to fill out their questionnaires have been canceled or postponed. Public libraries that were supposed to provide computers on which people could fill out the census are closed.

So events marking Census Day — the reference date the Census Bureau uses to measure the U.S. population — have turned into social media campaigns, phone banking, and virtual happy hours and trivia.

"I continue to be so impressed with how much technology is allowing us to do things that we could not have done” in previous census counts, said Fernando Armstrong, director of the Census Bureau’s Philadelphia Regional Office.

Philadelphia will run online games of Census Jeopardy and bingo on Wednesday. Residents also can enter to win prizes by posting a photo of their household completing the census on Instagram or sharing a Mural Arts Instagram post. The city has set a goal of calling 1,000 residents per day and eventually getting to 5,000 daily calls encouraging participation in the census, said Stephanie Reid, executive director of Philly Counts 2020, the city’s effort to ensure all residents are counted.

"We’re thinking of ways we can reach people in this new world we’re living in right now,” Reid said. "Some people are actually quite happy to hear from someone outside their families.”

Philadelphia is distributing census information with meals at food distribution centers for coronavirus relief. The city also is encouraging a beneficial kind of community spread in which residents each call five people to persuade them to fill out their forms.

“People are wanting to find ways to feel like they’re doing some good,” Reid said.

The 2020 Census will determine the distribution of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funds to state and local governments, the boundaries of voting districts, and the number of seats each state receives in the U.S. House for the next decade. Funding levels for medical centers, schools, infrastructure, housing, and community development depend on decennial population counts.

Right before the city shut down, Philly Counts workers and volunteers hung census information on about 75,000 doors in Strawberry Mansion, Juniata, and Oxford Circle. Early data show higher response rates in areas that got door hangers. The city has about 125,000 door hangers it never got to distribute.

New nationwide census ads reference the population count in the time of pandemic. In one video that appeared on Twitter, a soothing female voice says, “There will be parties again soon. And family gatherings. There will be parades and sporting events and concerts. To help our communities when they come back together, respond to the 2020 Census now.”

The Census Bureau has had to delay field operations because of the coronavirus pandemic. On Saturday, the bureau announced it was suspending operations that required census workers to gather or to move through neighborhoods for an additional two weeks until April 15. The bureau also has pushed back its deadline for collecting responses to Aug. 14 at the earliest, instead of July 31.

The number of applications for census taker jobs is climbing, along with the response rate, which Armstrong expects to spike after paper questionnaires hit mailboxes next week.

As of Tuesday, 37.5% of Pennsylvania’s households had submitted responses to the census online, by mail, or by phone, according to a national response map by the City University of New York Graduate Center. New Jersey’s response rate was 36.5%, just above the nation’s 36.2% rate.