Andrew Hait: Welcome everyone to this afternoon's
webinar on the COVID-19 Data Hub. My name again is Andrew Hait. I'm an Economist at the US Census Bureau at
our headquarters office in Maryland. And today we are going to be doing a couple
of things. First, we're going to be providing an overview
of some of the key programs that we have that are available in the COVID-19 Data Hub. My colleague Billy Gamble is going to talk
about the demographic data from the American Community Survey that is in the COVID-19 hub.
He'll talk a little bit about the statistics
that we specifically selected and maybe why those statistics were chosen to be included
in the COVID-19 Data Hub the information that they can provide that can be useful to folks
who are trying to understand the potential impact of the pandemic on our local communities
and it's residents. Then, I'm going to be taking over and talking
about the business statistics, the other side of the Census Bureau, the economic information
on the employer businesses and other self-employed people that are included in the COVID-19 Data
Hub. In that portion of the presentation I'll also
talk about a couple of the programs that we stood up at the Census Bureau specifically
designed to collect information about the actual impacts of the pandemic on our households
and on people. Then I'm going to go ahead and actually do
a live demo of the latest version of the Hub. Now I know when you all signed up to attend
this Webinar you signed up to learn about the new Version 2.0 of the hub.
It's interesting to note that actually last
night (around 10:00 pm) we launched Version 2.1. So today we're going to be talking a little
bit about what's coming. Some of what I originally said was going to
be upcoming we've actually already released. And I think that is sort of indicative of
how not only fluid this hub has been but how agile the project has been. As the pandemic has evolved so have the statistics
that we include in the COVID-19 Data Hub. Version 2.0 was a substantial update to the
Hub and we'll talk a lot about what we've included in that update and what you can actually
use from that update; how you can use that data. But I'll also talk a bit about what we just
updated in Version 2.1. Finally, we will give you a preview of some
of the other things that are coming in Version 2.2 and in potential future updates of the
hub. A key point that I want to make then (and
I'll make it right now) is that you all have a role in shaping what type of information
is included in this hub.
The feedback that we have received from our
users in this particular program on this particular project has been invaluable. It has greatly advised us on what information
that we want to include. And that feedback has not only come from private
sector data users but even from the federal government as well. So you'll actually see that in the demo of
the hub. Finally, we'll be taking some questions at
the end. For those of you who connected via the audio
broadcast we will be entering your questions using the chat feature and we will be addressing
those questions at the end.
For those of you who do who did actually call
in on your phone we'll be able to take those questions at the end via the telephone. So, to get us started, I just want to talk
very briefly about what is the US Census Bureau. You all would have to be living under a rock
to know that we have not that we did not just complete collection of data from the decennial
census. Every ten years we do a complete count of
the US population. And to a lot of Americans that is the main
thing that we do.
If I had a dollar for every time someone said
to me, "I know what you all do it once every ten years, what do you do the other nine,"I
would be retired by now. In fact we conduct more than 130 monthly,
quarterly and annual and periodic programs each and every single year. These include demographic or household-based
surveys like the decennial census but they also include a program called the American
Community Survey that Billy's going to be talking about in just a moment. This is a fantastic resource that provides
incredible detailed demographic, socioeconomic and housing data that you all can use not
only to understand the potential impacts of the pandemic but that you also can use in
community economic development.
Small business owners use these data all the
time to research their markets and determine is now a good time and a good place to open
a particular business I'm considering? So, this is a great resource. It is a key data product that I send a lot
of users to and hopefully you all are key users of it as well. In addition to the American Community Survey,
though, we also conduct 58 business surveys. Every five years we do a complete economic
census that measures every employer business in the United States, but we also do a census
of governments and a variety of other programs.
With that I'd like to turn it over to Billy
who will now talk with us about the American Community Survey. Billy it's all yours. Billy Gamble: All right just waiting for the
presenter ball here. All right well good afternoon everyone and
thank you Andy. My name is Billy Gamble as Andy stated. I work in the outreach and education branch
here at the American Community Survey office. And I want to provide you a bit of information
about the American Community Survey which is commonly referred to as the ACS and what
it provides to the COVID hub. But before that let's do some quick background
information on the ACS. So the ACS is the nation's most current reliable
and accessible data source for statistics on critical topics. And every year 3.5 million households are
surveyed and the ACS helps to allocate more than $675 billion of federal spending each
year.
There are over 40 topics covered in the survey
and these topics support over 300 federal government uses. Now ACS data is released every year through
three key data releases. And this consists of our one year estimates,
our one year supplemental estimates and our five year estimates which is the data used
in the COVID hub. So on the previous slide I did mention there
are 40 topics covered in the ACS. The topics collected can be grouped into four
main characteristics consisting of social, demographic, economic and housing characteristics.
Social characteristics include topics such
as disability status, education, language spoken at home and others. Our demographic characteristics consist of
sex, age, race and Hispanic origin. Economic characteristics include topics such
as commuting to work employment status, income and others. And our housing characteristics include topics
such as computer and Internet use, housing costs, vehicles available and more. So as you may already be able to pinpoint
some of these topics collected by the ACS can be used to measure can be used for measures
for the COVID-19 hub to locate potential impacts of areas that may be more affected by the
virus.
In just a moment I will go over some specific
topics that were pulled into the hub itself. So now in addition to the various topics covered
an even greater strength of the ACS is the vast geographic area of the survey provides
data for. So the ACS covers more than 805,000 geographic
areas when taking into account all three of its annual data releases. So as you can see here on the slide the ACS
covered geographies overarching at the national level and is all the way granular to the block
groups. And in-between there you can see that there
are also states and counties. So both states and counties are important
as these geographies are actually pulled into the COVID hub from the ACS.
To get into specific topics in the COVID hub
so from the 40 plus topics in the ACS we initially used incoming COVID related data requests
to help determine topics for the hub for the hub site itself. These include variables on potentially vulnerable
populations and variables providing a portrait of the current social and economic landscape. These topics were chosen with the idea to
provide data to help decision makers focus their response efforts. So on this slide are the topics from the ACS
that are actually in the data hub. As you can see they cover several areas and
are topics that are related to COVID-19. Initially not all of these topics were part
of the hub but over time we have continued to add topics that are relevant to the pandemic
and the population that are most affected. So if you're interested in more information
about the American Community Survey and the data that it actually offers and provides
our ACS Web page is a good place to start.
So on the ACS Web page you can find our why
we ask pages which actually gives more information on a questions that are asked and what data
is obtained from those questions. You can also see a full list of our subjects
in the ACS and much more. And also on the slide as you can see we do
have a link for the COVID 19 data hub obviously right there on our ACS homepage. And please do remember the ACS data and the
COVID hub helps to show areas of potential impacts or areas that could be greatly affected
by the pandemic. But now I'll turn it back over to Andy and
he will cover some programs that show actual impacts from the pandemic itself.
Andy Hait: Great thanks so much Billy. So, as you can see the American Community
Survey produces an amazing wealth of statistics in their programs. We've incorporated a small portion of the
data from the ACS in the panel. And Greg if you can go ahead and give me the
ball I will go ahead and jump back over to the presentation. So awesome. Great, thank you so much Greg. So, as I was mentioning, we produce a lot
of data at the Census Bureau that can be used to understand the potential impacts of the
pandemic in our communities. Our economic census, our County Business Patterns,
our Nonemployer Statistics programs provide information about businesses in our states
and counties and metropolitan areas and cities. And those historical statistics can give us
an idea about the potential impacts to those businesses so we can forecast this is the
community that has a certain mix of certain types of businesses. This community might be more likely to be
impacted by the pandemic than other communities. But in addition to those sort of reference
databases we also realized at the beginning of the pandemic that we're going to have to
create some new programs that not only measured the potential impact of the pandemic but the
actual impact too.
And the very first of these programs that
we created is a program called Business Formation Statistics. Now, BFS is a program that we've actually
had at the bureau for quite some time. As many of you already know, one of the ways
the Census Bureau maintains a complete universe of every known business in the United States
is through interactions and relationships that we have with other federal agencies. Each and every single week and month we receive
information from the Internal Revenue Service on people who have contacted the IRS requesting
an employer notification number.
Historically we have taken that information,
we've used it to update our business register, and every year we create a tabulation of all
of those people that formed new businesses during that calendar year. At the beginning of a pandemic, though, we
realized that these business formations might give us a real insight new businesses how
startups, if you will, have been impacted by the pandemic.
So, we actually took this annual program and
we've changed it into a weekly program that shows how startups were impacted throughout
the pandemic. As you can see on the slide, we included some
visualization of data and you can see at the very beginning of the pandemic, we've noticed
a marked decline in the number of business formations as companies who were considering
starting, decided to put their plans on hold and wait until the pandemic has sort of settled
down a little. But if you looked at the more recent data,
you'd see that many of these companies have now caught back up.
In fact you can know this even as of week
36 or for fiscal year or calendar year 2020 (which this visualization on the right is
for) we saw a marked increase in the year to year percent change in the number of business
formation. These are businesses that would have normally
started towards the beginning or middle of the pandemic but held off and now have decided
to do it a little bit later on. So, this is a great program in terms of producing
statistics on new business. Now in addition to those new businesses we
also realized that we were going to have to do something special to measure how small
businesses were being impacted. We knew that it was likely that small businesses
were going to be impacted in a different sort of way than larger companies might be. So we stood up a survey called the Small Business
Pulse Survey, or SBPS, that is designed to measure on a weekly basis the impacts of small
to small businesses of the pandemic. Like the business formation statistics, they
created a dashboard on their web site that allowed users to go in and actually look at
some tabulated statistics.
This data as you can see are shown at the
national and state level. There's also some selected information available
by metropolitan area. And these business statistics are tabulated
by each sector. So, on the right hand side of the slide you
can see that certain sectors have been impacted very differently than others. The second to last bar on the right is for
NAICS 72. That is the accommodation and food services
sector. This is the sector that we've all heard about
as being greatly impacted by the pandemic. You can see how much more these businesses
had a large negative impact at least as of the date for these particular set of data. It's interesting to note that NAICS 61 and
NAICS 72 are – and 71 excuse me, are right behind NAICS 72.
NAICS 71 is the arts, entertainment, and recreation
sector. This is the sector that some of you might
have heard recently is going to be eligible to receive some additional recovery monies
to help these performing arts companies and others sort of get back on their feet. I also do personally find it interesting to
note that NAICS 22, which is the utilities sector, and NAICS 52, which is the finance
and insurance sector, have seen in a much lower impact. I guess we had to be grateful that our local
utility companies did not see a marked decline, did not see layoffs and that that allowed
us to have utilities, electricity during this entire period. Now the third program I want to talk about
is our Household Pulse Survey. Like the Small Business Pulse Survey, the
Household Pulse Survey was designed to measure the impact of the pandemic on families, on
households, on people in the United States. Like the small Business Pulse Survey, they
have created a dashboard on their Web site.
You're seeing a screenshot of it right here. One point I want to make though about the
Household Pulse Survey and their particular visualizations they've created you'll notice
on the left-hand side of the visualization, there are seven categories, seven different
questions that were asked on the Household Pulse Survey of about whether or not that
household experienced any kind of food scarcity or housing insecurity or whether they had
difficulty paying for household expenses — things along those lines. The seven questions are just a fraction of
the total number of questions that were asked on the Household Pulse Survey. There's much, much more data available and
I would really encourage you to all check out their data page and actually go ahead
and take a look at that information. So, I've included here on the slide some information
that links to both the actual visualizations here as well as their data page where you
can access that data.
Now the fourth program that I want to talk
about is our Community Resilience Estimates Program. This program was designed to measure the potential
impacts of the pandemic in terms of the resilience of communities to deal with the impacts or
effects that are caused by a pandemic. In developing this program, they identified
11 risk factors that were specifically related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We know that certain characteristics of communities
contributed to whether or not that community was affected in a greater way or in a lesser
way. Communities, for example, that have very high
population density, the spread of the virus was much greater in those communities. So we applied these 11 risk factors to the
American Community Survey data that Billy just talked about and in the end created a
visualization that shows for each county in the United States whether that county is subject
to no risk factors (that you could sort of equate to being as highly resilient) versus
one to two risk factors or three or more risk factors. The data in this program are being released
each and every single – excuse me, for each and every single geography county. And one of the things I want to make, a point
I want to make about the community resilience estimates, is of these four programs I've
just talked about, this is the one that is likely going to live beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our staff who work on this program are already
considering they're already researching applying different risk factors to look at the resilience
of communities to other types of disasters. So if you think about a community and its
resilience to something like a hurricane, the risk factors that you might associate
with the ability for that community to deal with that hurricane might be quite different
than the risk factors associated with that community dealing with a global pandemic like
COVID-19. So, we are actually already working on that. And one very important point I want to make
is our staff are very interested in hearing from you all about the information that we
are collecting. What are those risk factors that you think
we ought to be considering when we're thinking about caring this program forward in the future. Now, these four programs that I just talked
about are all included on the COVID-19 Data Hub.
And in just a minute we're actually going
to jump out and I'm going to show you what that hub looks like. In addition to those four programs, though,
we also fairly recently stood up two additional data sets. And one of them measures information on how
state and local governments have been impacted in terms of their sales tax collections.
The Household Pulse Survey and the Small Business
Pulse Survey programs both help us understand how households and how small businesses are
being impacted by the pandemic. But we also know that our state and local
governments are likely being impacted. I know in the state of Maryland where I live,
the state has seen a marked decline in the sales taxes that they collect for gasoline
because such a large portion of us in Maryland are not commuting every single day to work. I regularly used to fill up my tank more than
once a week. I'm now going almost two weeks between gas
fill ups. That's certainly going to be impacting my
state as they're not going to be collecting sales taxes.
So, we created a special survey that actually
collects information publishing data on monthly state sales tax collections. And I would really encourage you all to check
this out. The second and last program that I want to
talk about is the Monthly State Retail Sales report. Many of you are probably regular users of
our MRTS Survey the Monthly Retail Trade Survey. This is one of our economic indicator programs
that provides amazingly timely data about how the retail sector has been impacted by
the pandemic. Looking at the MRTS data you can clearly see
that there's some retail related industries that have seen a major decline in their sales,
something like clothing stores, for example, whereas other retail industries, like non-store
retailers (what we typically think of as online shopping) has seen a boom in their industry.
These Monthly Retail Trade Survey data are
invaluable to understanding the national impact of the pandemic but the data in that survey
is only shown at the national level. We realized that the impact on retail sales
was not going to be uniform across all states so we are now publishing state level information
on retail sales. And you can really see how retail sector is
being affected more in some states than others. Now to provide access to all of this data,
users, of course, could simply go to the individual program pages, and I have provided the links
to actually access that data.
And we know that there are some of you that
are probably already doing that. I know at the very beginning of the presentation
someone asked a question about are these statistics that are available in the COVID-19 Data Hub
also available in the Census Bureau's data API. The short answer is yes but the longer answer
is not all of them. Our data are available for download, and some
are available in the new API. And while some users like apparently this
one particular user is someone who is familiar with APIs and is comfortable pulling bulk
volumes of data, we knew that a lot of users were not going to have that level of expertise. They were going to need to have some information
assembled to them for their purposes. And what – were going to want to go see visualizations
of the data so they could actually kind of compare one area to another.
They were going to want to have a sort of
pre-format, if you will, of the data available to them for download. So, the result of those discussions is the
COVID-19 Data Hub. What you're seeing on your slide right now
are some screenshots from the COVID-19 Data Hub. And I'm now going to jump out of this PowerPoint
presentation and actually do a live demo of the hub for you so you can see what other
new things that were included in Version 2.0 of the hub versus what are the features that
were there from before.
So, to get to the COVID-19 Data Hub, we go
to Census Bureau's main page, http://www.census.gov. We put our cursor over browse by topic and
we click on the Emergency Management Link. This is currently where the COVID-19 hub is
residing. When I click on Emergency Management the page
is going to refresh. This is the page that we have been storing
all the information about the different hurricanes and fires and floods and other disasters during
last year. You all know that we had a very active hurricane
season, to the point that we actually had to dip into the Greek alphabet. But this is actually where our coronavirus
page and information is available. So, if you click on the Coronavirus Pandemic
icon, then go ahead and click over here, we're actually going to lunch our Coronavirus Pandemic
Resource page. On this resource page we have a couple of
things. At the very top we have a link to Version
2.1 of the COVID-19 Data Hub. Just this morning (or late last night) we
deployed Version 2.1 that includes some major updates to the hub, and you can see those
updates are actually listed here for you all to see.
Below the link to the COVID-19 Data Hub are
then the links to those four programs that I talked about — Business Formation Statistics,
the Small Business Pulse Survey, Community Resilience Estimates and the Household Pulse
Survey. These links bring you over to the Program
page for that particular program where you can access the visualizations that I was just
showing you. You can also access the raw data for download,
et cetera. Below there we have links to the Census Business
Builder Regional Analyst Edition tool and then below that we had some pre-defined deep
links into our data.census.gov platform for you to access key information from the American
Community Survey. I'm going to go back up here to the top and
I'm going to click on the COVID-19 Data Hub so I can show you what are what is the information
that we have in this hub and what are the things that we just recently added.
So, at the very, very top of the hub we have
a link to a document that tells you what's new, what have we recently added and what's
coming soon. We have a place for you to sign up to stay
connected about this hub to receive notifications when we've made updates to it. And this is that very important feedback link
that I mentioned. Please, please, please as you use information
from this hub and you find things really useful or maybe you find some things that you want
to comment on, I would encourage you all to please and to do that. Now below these links we have a couple of
key statistics about the population aged 65 and older, the uninsured population and the
number of businesses, both employer businesses (almost 8 million businesses with paid employees)
and the 26 million or so self-employed people, what we called Nonemployer Statistics. Below there is what we call the Impact Planning
Report.
And this is actually where we're seeing the
first change in Version 2.1 of the COVID-19 Data Hub. Many of you know that we have included information
in this hub as of the latest vintage of the American Community Survey and our economic
programs. So, in this update we've actually updated
the data to the latest American Community Survey data. I'm really happy to report that and we've
also updated our business data. So, these statistics here that used to be
from the 2017 County Business Patterns and Nonemployer Statistics programs are now available
for the 2018 programs.
We've also added some statistics in the 2017
Economic Census to the COVID-19 Data Hub. They were not in here originally. In addition, if you had clicked on this bar
chart before you would've seen a chart that shows data for selected four digit industries
that are likely being impacted by the pandemic. We got a lot of feedback from customers about
those industries that we selected, wanting to know why we had chosen those certain industries. Did we think those were the only ones that
were being impacted? And what we realized is that while those were
very informative, looking at data at a broader to digit NAICS sectors was potentially a better
way of doing it. So you can see we've now updated these visualizations
to show information at the two-digit NAICS sector level.
All of these data can be downloaded and printed
and you can actually incorporate this into your own work. Now, this is a two page report. This entire second page includes information
again from the American Community Survey, some really good information that helps people
understand the potential impacts of the pandemic. I do want to quickly make a mention that this
is where one of our changes that we are planning on doing in the future is likely to happen. We know that as we are moving into vaccine
distribution, that some of the statistics that we have in this platform that were valuable
to understand the spread of the pandemic, the spread of the virus across the United
States, we know that some additional statistics might be useful to help understand the distribution
of vaccine across the nation.
For example, we know already from looking
at the Group 1A and 1B and 1C and Group 2 and Group 3 categories that occupation is
likely going to play a role in sending out vaccine to Americans. So, we are considering adding some additional
statistics to the impact report that would help users understand those occupations. Now, you'll notice that these statistics are
available at the state level. The application automatically defaults to
New York State but the applicants can go ahead and change the geography to whatever state
they are interested in. And then finally you can also go in and look
at these statistics by county.
So instead of looking at the data just for
Colorado, if I want to specifically look at data for Boulder County I can go ahead and
click on Boulder County and now we're actually seeing the demographic and business data for
Boulder County, Colorado. Below the Impact Planning Report we have links
to those four surveys that I was talking about. For three of the four links we have actually
built a second dashboard that supplements the dashboard that is available on the BFS,
Small Business Pulse and the Community Resilience Estimates pages.
For the Household Pulse Survey, the link here
brings you out to the Household Pulse Survey page where you can go in and actually browse
the data there. We haven't actually created a separate dashboard
for the Household Pulse Survey. And in Version 2.1 you can see we've now added
tiles that specifically bring you over to those state sales tax collections and those
monthly state level retail sales reports again. This platform is designed to be a central
repository for all lot of the information that we have at the census bureau to help
people understand the potential impacts of the pandemic. Below these tiles we then have these policy
maps. The policy maps allow users to browse selected
statistics that are shown in that dashboard at the very top at a more detailed level of
geography. So, for example, you can see this map number
one is looking at data on employer businesses from county business patterns.
If I cycle through this list we will then
come to information about the Accommodation and Food Services sector. This is looking at the sales per establishment
as the color and the size of the circle is the number of businesses. If I wanted to understand how is the distribution
of food service businesses in Texas, I could go ahead and zoom in on the map. And as I zoom this map in the map is going
to refresh and we're going to start to see county level data. And we can do that further using some of the
other maps. So this is a great resource to sort of visualize
the businesses and demographics of the areas that are likely being impacted by the pandemic.
The very last of these nine maps here is a
Social Vulnerability Index. This is actually data that we have gotten
from the Center for Disease Control, the CDC, that shows how counties are vulnerable to
certain issues. Now these maps can of course be shared. We've added the share feature right here. And because this Web site was created for
us by Esri, all of the information that we've seen so far is available for you GIS professionals
to be able to incorporate into your own platforms. Below there we have incorporated links to
some of our key data sets. We knew that a lot of users of the COVID-19
Data Hub were going to be interested in viewing this data online and we also knew that there
was going to be a lot of people that would of wanted to be able to download the data
and incorporate it into their own projects, into their own research, into their own Web
sites. So we had provided access to some of those
data from this Highlighted Data Sets page.
And then way down here at the bottom of the
page this kind of a local data set search allows you to go in and access all of the
information that we've incorporated on the page. I could go into the Business Characteristics
tab and I could actually go in and download each of the different data sets that we've
incorporated into this hub. You could see here is our non-employer statistics
data, state level data and county level data from the 2018 Nonemployer Statistics, the
NES program, the county business patterns, et cetera.
Now you'll notice that the downloads are available
to you in both Excel file format and as a feature layer. Again, working with Esri, they've been really
great to work with because they've made the data available into a feature layer service
so GIS professionals who are used to using the ArcGIS applications and ArcGIS online
can actually incorporate this data into their projects. Now the last part of the hub I want to talk
about is the part that was really updated the most during Version 2.0 of the hub.
As we've been talking with federal agencies
about the work that we've done on this hub, we had conversations with representatives
from FEMA. So they were pretty happy with what we had
done in this COVID-19 Data Hub and they asked us if we would be interested in potentially
hosting links to some of the data sets that they have been assembling and making available
as part of their work. Working with the Argonne National Labs, they
assembled a set of data sets that were available for access and for download, but those data
sets were only accessible to a limited audience, folks who had access to the Argonne site who
had a username and password to get in and do that, which was mostly federal agencies. What they really wanted was for these really
valuable data sets to be exposed to a much larger audience.
And as you can see we thought that this was
a great idea. We really thought that providing access to
these data sets to a larger audience really not only celebrated the value of those data
sets themselves but also celebrated the value of mashing up Census Bureau data with other
data. And you'll notice from the Logos here that
these data sets are not only from other federal statistical agencies like SBA, USDA and BLS
but they're also from private-sector companies Vision Lab, Womply, Google even the American
Alliance of Museums to understand how museums potentially are being impacted. So, to get to this data, we click on the Open
Data Sets page. And this will now bring us to a portal where
we can go in and access those 38 data sets that we have provided links to from the COVID-19
Data Hub.
Those data sets are organized into three broad
categories. All of the data sets related to business and
economics are available by clicking on this tab. All of the data sets that are related to individuals
and households (sort of the demographic data) are available under this tab, and finally
all the data sets that are related to government services are available here. Below those three tabs we have provided a
select link to eight of the data sets under that broad category. So you can see for example under this category
business and economics we have the payroll – Paycheck Protection Program or PPP loan
data from the SBA that included a key resource that's available as well as things like weekly
business closures from a private sector company called Womply.
As you can see on the slide we give you information
about the level of geographic data that is available there and we've explored data links
allow you to jump out and go directly to that program providers data set page where you
can then access that data. Now I will tell you that this is a giant first
step I think towards making this data accessible to an audience. The experience you will have when you go to
each of these explore data links will be different, but again, you are going through the SBA Web
site or the BLS Web site or the BEA Web site or the Opportunity Insights Web site to access
these data.
But we are already in consultation and discussions
with FEMA and others to see if there's other things that we could do to actually provide
more comprehensive access to these data sets. Now if we click on one of these tabs here
we get the full list of all the data sets under that particular topic. So we can see under this Business and Economics
topic there actually 15 data sets — information from BEA, BLS, SBA, et cetera. So you can see there's a lot of data that
we have incorporated into this hub from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I would really encourage you all to check
these out. I have already talked to a number of data
users that are already thinking about mash ups they want to now do because we've made
this data accessible to such a larger audience. So I'm really proud of the fact that we made
the data accessible because it really celebrates the value that we all can bring to understanding
the potential impacts of the pandemic.
So, that brings me to the end of my main part
of my demo. I'm going to go ahead and switch back over
to my PowerPoint slide to allow us to kind of close this out. So, we walked through the different surveys
and the different aspects of the site. We talked about the highlighted data sets
and how you can access those data in their raw form.
Let's now close this out by talking about
what's coming in the future. Now as many of you know we are constantly
updating these monthly COVID related programs, those four programs that I was talking about. We will continue to apply updates to these
to the hub to reflect the latest data. So, for example, some of you may have seen
the announcement yesterday that the Small Business Pulse Survey, which recently completed
Phase 3 of the Small Business Pulse Survey, is likely going to be moving into the future
into a Phase 4.
As many of you know who have accessed that
Small Business Pulse Survey data the questions that were asked on each of the three existing
phases, the first three phases of the Small Business Pulse Survey evolved over time. We started asking questions at the very beginning
but then didn't make sense to keep asking in Phase 2. Some of those questions were removed and we
started adding new questions that made more sense as the pandemic was evolving as was
– as it was changing. That will continue to happen as we move forward
so users can make sure that were getting data out to you that can help you understand how
businesses are not only responding to but hopefully recovering from the pandemic. In addition, we provide this update to the
County Business Patterns, Nonemployer Statistics, and Economic Census data. These were just added in Version 2.1. This was a what's coming slide. What's coming has actually happened so I'm
really happy about that. And again, we provided those additional links
to those other Census Bureau programs that provide related information.
The state tax sales tax collection and the
information on monthly state retail sales. We are also in the process of adding a new
dashboard from our International Database program. We've realized that in talking to users that
providing some information not only helped the United States but also including some
of the data that we have available from our IDB might be really useful so we've actually
been in the process of doing that. That will likely be added in Version 2.2 of
the hub. And finally we are going to be updating the
American Community Survey data to not only show the latest vintage which we've already
done but also potentially include some additional data variables that are not included right
now in the COVID-19 Data Hub but that might be really useful to folks as we move forward
into the recovery from the pandemic.
I already mentioned and teased you all little
about the fact that we are considering some industry and occupation type information but
I just wanted to point out that that's a work in progress. We're still working on that. So, to summarize our presentation today, I
want to thank you all for attending. The Census Bureau has an amazing wealth of
data that can provide information on not only the potential impacts but also the actual
impacts of the pandemic. Programs like the Business Formation Statistics,
Small Business Pulse Survey, Household Pulse Survey, monthly state sales tax collections
and monthly state retail sales reports all give us information about how businesses and
households are actually being impacted by the pandemic. We've actually written a number of America
Counts stories that feature some information from these programs that highlight things
like folks who are younger and are living alone are being impacted in a very different
way than folks who are living with someone else, maybe with their family. So those type of statistics are really amazing
and informative. I would encourage you all to check out our
America Counts web site to see more about these other stories that we've written.
To understand the potential impacts of the
pandemic our economic programs and our business, our demographic programs like the American
Community Survey, county business patterns, Non-employer Statistics and the Economic Census
can provide some really valuable information on how households and businesses are being
impacted or potentially being impacted. And again I want to put out a big plug to
our folks in the Community Resilience Estimates Program; obviously this is a great program
that I'm sure will live well beyond the pandemic to understand how resilient communities are
to not only the pandemic but also other sorts of disasters. In the end, we created this hub to present
data from these selected programs in informative intuitive dashboards and maps where you can
browse the data and in downloadable resources. We really want you all to be utilizing this
information. And finally, as my last point here again and
again and again I said we want your feedback. We want to understand how useful this hub
is to you all, things that we have on here. And if there are additional things that we
could do that would make these data more valuable to you and to other decision-makers in your
industry, in your communities we want to hear that.
This has been an agile project has evolved
a lot over just nine or ten months or so that the hub has been going. So, with that I want to say thank you to you
all and let's see about going ahead and taking some questions. Coordinator: And as a reminder… Greg P: Hi Andy, this is Greg, did you want
to take some over the phone or some chat questions first? What's your preference? Andy Hait: Yes, operator if you want to see
if folks have questions that they want to ask over the phone if you want to say something
about them entering their questions via the phone.
And while we're waiting for them to do that
we can take a couple of chat questions. That would be great Greg. Coordinator: Sure. If you like to ask a question at this time. You may press Star 1 and clearly record your
name for question introduction. Again to ask questions over the phone lines
press Star 1 and clearly record your name for question introduction. Just a few moments to see if we have questions
over the phone lines. Thank you. Greg P: Great thanks operator. And Andy so we've got – we've had a busy chat
line here. Let's see here one question came in and the
attendee wrote, "I've had community partners ask why the Census Bureau isn't asking questions
about masks… –let's see here…– about mask wear in the Household Pulse and Small
Business Surveys. Thoughts on including that in the future?" Andy Hait: Yes, great question. So obviously the question is that we are asking
all of these programs are ones that we feel we can collect valuable data for and also
are questions where other data providers are not already asking that same question.
As valuable as the data is that the Census
Bureau is collecting and publishing about the impacts of the pandemic, we are certainly
not the only US federal statistical agency or even state agency that is collecting information
on the impacts of the pandemic. And yes, there are other agencies that are
collecting information on things like mask wearing and things like that. I know we've all heard the reports about the
impacts and how mask wearing affects the spread of the virus. Those are data that are actually being collected
to help measure the impact of mask wearing on others. So I would encourage you all to check that
out. The 38 data sets that we had added links to
in the COVID-19 Data Hub would represent a pretty substantial share of the total amount
of data but that list is not the full list. Even in the short time since that list has
been published I've had a number of users that have contacted me and said, "Andy I don't
see the following data set in your list. How do we add more data to this hub?"That's
part of that feedback that I so think is so important.
So I would encourage you all if there are
other data sets that you have identified that you think would be valuable for us to add
here whether it's from your association or your organization or from your – another data
provider that you've identified please let us know, so great question. Greg P: Operator did any questions come in
over the phone? Coordinator: Yes. I'm showing we have one question; your line
is now open. (Caller 1): Yes. Andy Hait: Hello?
(Caller 1): Can you hear me? Andy Hait: Yes I can. (Caller 1): Okay a couple of things. I am a farmer, a tree farmer and when you
asked the seven questions about the family household impact with the household survey
are farmers being identified about that because some of this PPP and the Economic Disaster
Loans, the EDL is not getting down to us so we are being affected.
Andy Hait: Right. So, I'm sorry to hear that you're not seeing
some of that. What I would encourage you to do is check
out the Household Pulse Survey Web site to learn about how we actually pulled the sample
that we used to actually send out to those households to be surveyed. The Census Bureau is really pretty good about
how we conduct our sample surveys. I have spent 33 years working in our economic
directorate the Census Bureau and I've always been amazed about the lengths that we go to
ensure that we have a good representative sample of businesses in our monthly and quarterly
and annual and periodic business surveys. I'm sure the exact same thing has also applied
to the Household Pulse Survey so I don't think they specifically excluded certain groups. Whether they over sampled a particular area
or not is a good question.
I would really encourage you to check out
that Household Pulse Survey Web site to see how were the households selected, what was
the sample size of the Household Pulse Survey because they gives you some indication of
how many households were likely selected for the samples, et cetera. So yes I would encourage you to check that
out. Now of course when it comes to distribution
of monies via these various different programs that have been established by federal agencies
like PPP and CARES Act, et cetera those monies are being distributed to those different communities
in a variety of different ways. And one of the things I'll say is if you look
at some of those additional data sets that we've now added to the hub you can see pretty
quickly how things like PPP loans were distributed to businesses slightly different than the
CARES Act money was distributed.
In many ways the money was distributed to
either individual cities or to counties or even to the state as a whole or how that money
then got from the city or the counties or the state as a whole to the individual households
and businesses in their communities was somewhat left up to the local jurisdiction to actually
make that decision. So, there's a variety of different ways. The data is really pretty amazing to understand
how we been responding to the pandemic and maybe how we ought to be responding in the
future.
So hopefully I answered your question. (Caller 1): Because it's affecting also our
vaccine distribution. Being rural there's very few hospitals and
doctors sites. So as you're doing the 1A and the 1B distribution
of the two different vaccines occupation, age and location is affecting us. Andy Hait: Yes, absolutely. I know that is the vaccine is being rolled
out the different groups, the demographic groups that are being included in each of
the distribution varies widely from state to state. I know in Maryland where I live teachers were
included in one of our first, our first groups 1A and 1B whereas in other states teachers
weren't going to be getting their vaccines until perhaps later.
So, it's been an interesting thing. I think in many ways we are figuring this
out as we go along and each state has been allowed to sort of do their own thing. We'll see how that moves forward into 2021
so great question. Thank you so much for calling. (Caller 1): Thank you Andy. Andy Hait: You're welcome. Operator any other calls questions on the
phone? Coordinator: I'm currently showing no additional
questions at this time.
Andy Hait: Okay Greg any other chat questions
we can talk about? Greg P: Well let's see, we've got a number
of folks thanking you for an informative Webinar. A couple questions on social vulnerability. One says, what are the top line differences
between community resilience estimates and social vulnerability? Andy Hait: Yes, that's a great question. So, to understand how the Center for Disease
Control determined and calculated that Social Vulnerability Index I would really encourage
you to check out their Web site. The links to that page is one of the links
that's included in that list of 38 data set links. I don't even want to try to do it any injustice. I know that I won't do how they calculate
that index in any kind of way. For the Community Resilience Estimates Program
though we determined what were those 11 risk factors that were the ones that were appropriate. And we then applied those risk factors to
the micro level data from the American Community Survey. So basically we took those risk factors, we
looked at the individuals responses from the American Community Survey we applied those
risk factors to that and then we then re-tabulated the American Community Survey data to show
to identify those geographies, those types of tracts for example that met one of the
risk factors or two of the risk factors or three or more of the risk factors or for that
matter none of the risk factors.
So, we had a little bit more say over what
we determined. And a lot of those risk factors were determined
by consultations we had from other professionals, other organizations that said yes you need
to make sure that you include age as one of the key risk factors or maybe you need to
include information on population density as one of those key 11 risk factors. So again I'd encourage you to check out the
documentation for the community resilience estimates, understand what the level of factors
were and again how we applied them to the data and moving forward how we might change
those risk factors moving forward to be ones that are more appropriate for fires and floods
and hurricanes and tornadoes and other sorts of disasters that we experience in the US. Greg P: Okay. Another question is, Is a possible to get
household pulse data not in the interactive tool as a time series or would a user have
to go into each week's table individually and pull the data manually?" Andy Hait: Yes, that's a great question.
So, the Household Pulse Survey Web site provides
access to downloadable files that can be pulled down so you can do this work yourself. And many of those data sets are individual
period time period data sets. However, we just started releasing some of
the data from these surveys in our API. So that's a perfect use case for someone who
might want to pull data for multiple time periods maybe every week that the Household
Pulse Survey was done on a particular topic that was asked in the Household Pulse Survey
for that period. The API would be a perfect way to go in and
actually access that broader data or that data across multiple time frames. So yes that's a great use case for the API. Greg P: Okay a couple of questions came in
on urban and rural data.
How do we get the urban and rural data from
the Pulse Household Survey data? Yes, so I am not aware to be quite honest
whether they published specifically the urban rural breakout in the Household Pulse Survey
data. I know they have information at the national
state, county and metropolitan area levels but I'm not sure if they actually applied
that urban rural breakout on there. Of course, we do have other geographic resources
at the Census Bureau that would allow you to associate a particular county whether with
– whether or not that county was primarily urban or primarily rural. So you can sort of to that association yourself
but I don't think we actually published the data for the Household Pulse Survey in the
urban rural breakout. What I would encourage you to do is please
send me an email.
My email address is here on the slide right
now. Send me an email and I will make sure I get
with our Household Pulse Survey folks so that they can answer that question better than
I can. Greg P: Let's see. I think we covered most of them here. If I'm missing folk's question I apologize. Andy's info is on the screen there. But Andy that – that's most of the chat questions. Andy Hait: Okay. Billy did you want to follow up on anything
may be that I covered during the presentation that you want to provide some additional feedback
on? Billy Gamble: I think I'm okay for now. There are a few chat questions that came in
that I answered so my information is on our branch information is on the our branch information
is on the screen so that users can feel attendees can feel free to contact us by phone or email. Andy Hait: Great. Okay well again thank you all so much. If there is no other questions, operator any
more questions for the phone? Coordinator: There are no questions online
at this time.
Andy Hait: Great. Well again thank you all so much for taking
time out of your busy schedules. Hopefully I have teased you enough to make
you want to go out and check out this resource that we have created for you to be able to
access information about the impacts of the pandemic. Thank you all so much for taking time out
of your busy schedules and have a great afternoon. Coordinator: This will conclude today's conference. All participants may now disconnect. Thank you for your participation on today's
call..
