LANSING - Officials from the U.S. Census Bureau held a tele-conference on Wednesday to give updates about the U.S. Census. Data being collected for the Census ended on October 15th.

As of October 19th, 99.98% of all addresses in the U.S. were accounted for in the Census. There were 20 million more addresses accounted for in the 2020 Census than in the 2010 Census. 67% of households self responded online, by phone or by mail. 32.9% were accounted for through the Non-Response Follow Up (NRFU).

The NRFU consisted of volunteers going door to door to non-responsive households and the use of case routing optimization software.

Addresses that are unresponsive are visited three times before the bureaus refers to a proxy response, someone like a landlord, neighbor or mailman to get information about the household. 9 million non-responsive households self-responded to the Census after the first visit.

Albert Fontenot, Associate Director for Decennial Programs for the U.S Census said, “If we do not get a response from a household and we have high quality administrative records that provide the same information for that address then we use those data sources.”

The homeless community is usually counted during the month of April, but this was delayed to September due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. The Census Bureau partnered with service providers and stakeholders to count the homeless community. There are significantly more service-based enumeration locations than there were in 2010.

The deadline to fill out the Census was pushed back to two months as a result of the pandemic. The Census Bureau had to adjust their operations so that they have enough time to analyze the data.

Computer resources were operating 24 hours a day and staff worked for 7 days a week including weekends and holidays. The bureau focused more on apportionments opposed to redistricting. Redistricting is more complex because it takes into account every congressional district opposed to apportionment which one focuses on the 50 states and territories.

The Census bureau has until December 31, 2020 to “convert, check, and validate” the data.