COVID-19 Advocacy Center

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the upcoming changes to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. I find the information gathered by the survey to be highly valuable and I support the agency continuing to administer the survey.

I respectfully submit the following suggestions for the agency to consider as it updates the survey questionnaire:

The survey should collect more information on the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on children, including COVID-19 infections and long COVID symptoms.

The survey should prompt respondents to specify the total number of COVID-19 infections they have experienced, by year, to improve data collection on the impact of COVID-19 reinfections.

The survey should collect additional information on COVID-19 antiviral treatments, including symptom rebounds and treatment access barriers.

The survey should collect additional information on COVID-19 disease severity, including whether patients were hospitalized during their acute infection. For people who were not hospitalized, the survey should ask respondents why they were not hospitalized. The survey should also collect information from respondents regarding their attitudes towards hospital safety in response to many healthcare providers and health systems choosing to rescind mask mandates for their staff.

The survey should collect additional information on long COVID by asking respondents to rate the severity of their long COVID symptoms when they were at their worst. The survey should also include additional long COVID symptoms in the prompt for question PASC1, including allergies and allergic reactions, diabetes, high or low blood pressure, headache, migraine, exercise intolerance, worsening of symptoms after physical or mental exertion, skin conditions, and sexual dysfunction. The survey should also ask respondents about the duration of their long COVID symptoms and whether their symptoms have improved or worsened. The survey should also ask respondents whether their long COVID symptoms have impacted their ability to work.

The survey should collect additional information about children with long COVID and those who experience long COVID symptoms after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine. The survey should also ask respondents if they experienced a serious health event following a COVID-19 infection, including a heart attack, stroke, aneurysm, blood clot, and organ failure, among others.

In addition to the survey’s questions about access to at-home COVID-19 tests, the survey should also collect information on access to laboratory testing.

The survey should ask respondents additional questions about mental health symptoms, including suicidal ideation, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), sleep disturbances and disorders, memory loss, difficulty multi-tasking, changes to their mood or personality, and impaired judgment. The survey should also ask respondents additional questions about movement disorders and vestibular dysfunction.

The question “EMP4” collects information regarding the reasons that a person has not worked in the past seven days, but the response to this question related to COVID-19 is overly broad. The answers to this question should allow respondents to distinguish between being sick with COVID-19, caring for someone who was sick with COVID-19, being concerned about being exposed to COVID-19 in the workplace, and being unable to work because of their long-term COVID-19 symptoms.

Thank you for considering my recommendations.