ORLANDO, Fla. — A week after starting its 2020 count for most of the U.S., the Census Bureau on Wednesday suspended field operations for two weeks out of concern about the health and safety of its workers and the U.S. public from the novel coronavirus.
Census Bureau officials said they were continuing to monitor all operations related to the once-a-decade head count amid the global pandemic. As of Wednesday, 11 million households had answered the census questions.
Most census workers won’t head into the field until May, when they’ll knock on the doors of homes that haven’t turned in their questionnaires. But some workers are already in the field. They were primarily dropping off paper questionnaires at places with no fixed addresses and large numbers of seasonal workers, or preparing for counts in a few weeks of the homeless and people who live in group housing such as college dorms, nursing homes and prisons.
The Census Bureau is aiming to hire as many as 500,000 workers for the 2020 census, and so far has 31,000 workers on the payroll.
