Giving Compass' Take:

· According to Smart Cities Dive, the US Census Bureau has suspended all field operations in an effort to protect the health of those collection data as the coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to spread.

· How will this suspension impact the count? What populations will not be accounted for?

· Check out this article about philanthropy and the 2020 US Census.

Despite potential impacts on the count, update enumerate operations that target rural areas have been paused until April 1 to protect public health as COVID-19 continues to spread.

The suspension of field operations will most directly impact update enumerate (UE) operations that are targeted at rural areas, such as northern parts of Maine and southeast Alaska, to update address lists and enumerate responses.

It will also likely have an impact on counting homeless groups at shelters or meal centers. Service-Based Enumeration (when hard-to-count populations are enumerated at the locations where they receive services) was slated to take place from March 30 through April 1.

Otherwise, the March suspension of field workers likely won't have an enormous impact on urban areas, though it's possible that other operations will be uprooted if the spread of COVID-19 doesn't slow down. The biggest impact could be on non-response follow up (NRFU) in May, Cara Brumfield, a senior policy analyst at the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality, told Smart Cities Dive.

​"Without the ability to knock on doors and follow-up with people who didn't self-respond, the Bureau is going to be in a pinch in terms of getting responses from those folks," Brumfield said of NRFU operations.

Read the full article about US Census field operations by Kristin Musulin at Smart Cities Dive.