Conducting a census during the coronavirus pandemic won’t be easy, but we have to get it right

To state the obvious, there’s never a good time for a pandemic. But among the things that make this a particularly bad time is that the United States is in the middle not only of a presidential election, but of the decennial census.

Notices have already been sent out to households across the nation about how to complete census forms online, but the Census Bureau has wisely suspended its outreach workers’ trips into neighborhoods to implore people to participate and to drop off notices at homes that don’t receive regular mail delivery. With much of the nation now living in near-isolation and COVID-19 spreading at stunning levels, this is no time for the government to risk exposing an army of door-knockers to the virus or, worse still, inadvertently spreading it door-to-door.

The problem with pausing the census process, though, is that doing so could affect the population count, particularly in California, where the breadth of our geography (from crowded coasts to sparsely populated deserts and mountainous regions) and immigrant population (about 1 in 4 residents were born in another country) pose significant challenges to census-takers. An artificially low count in this state could lead to a loss of representation in Congress and an unfair reduction in federal aid to California over the next decade.