By MIKE SCHNEIDER

AP – ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Two weeks after a federal judge prohibited the U.S. Census Bureau from winding down the 2020 census, a manager in Illinois instructed employees to get started with layoffs, according to an audio of the conversation obtained by The Associated Press.

During a conference call Thursday, the Chicago area manager told supervisors who report to him that they should track down census takers who don’t currently have any cases, collect the iPhones they use to record information, and bid them goodbye. The manager did not respond to an email from the AP.

“I would really like to get a head start on terminating these people,” he said. “All of these inactives that we have, we need to get rid of them. So hunt down your inactives, collect their devices, get them terminated and off of our lists.”

It was unclear whether such actions would violate U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh’s temporary restraining order prohibiting the Census Bureau from winding down field operations while she considers a request to extend the head count by a month.

Earlier this week, the judge, who is in San Jose, California, held a hearing on other possible violations of the order, but no action was taken after a Census Bureau official said in a declaration that they were unsubstantiated or the result of miscommunication. The judge extended the order for another week on Thursday.

Government attorneys told the judge earlier this month that the Census Bureau would refrain from laying off workers who were in the later stages of door knocking at the homes of residents who hadn’t yet answered the census questionnaire. They said workers could still be terminated for performance reasons, however.

While the Chicago area manager told his supervisors they couldn’t lay people off for lack of work, he suggested they could encourage census takers who haven’t had an assignment in a while to resign or fire them for poor performance.

“It doesn’t have to be their performance is poor. It just means it’s not good enough,” he said. “If you are going to terminate someone for performance, I want you to consult me first. But I’m pretty much going to be on your side, no matter what.”

The census taker also suggested that supervisors should unofficially plan on wrapping up their work by Saturday, 11 days short of the Sept. 30 deadline for ending the 2020 census.

Census Bureau spokesman Michael Cook said in a statement Friday that the agency was investigating.

“In the meantime, the U.S. Census Bureau continues to focus on conducting a complete 2020 Census count while instructing field personnel of their continuing obligation to comply with court orders,” Cook said.

The once-a-decade head count of every U.S. resident helps determine how $1.5 trillion in federal funding is distributed annually and how many congressional seats each state gets — a process known as apportionment. The census takers are sent out to knock on the doors of homes that have not yet responded to the census on their own, either online, by phone or by mail.

Before the coronavirus pandemic hit in March, the bureau had planned to complete the 2020 census by the end of July. In response to the pandemic, it extended the deadline to the end of October. That changed to the end of September after the Republican-controlled Senate failed to take up a request from the Census Bureau to extend the deadline for turning over the numbers used for apportionment. As a result, government attorneys told the judge, the Census Bureau has no choice but to finish the count by Sept. 30.

The temporary restraining order was requested by a coalition of cities, counties and civil rights groups that had sued the Census Bureau, demanding it restore the October deadline. The coalition had argued the earlier deadline would cause the Census Bureau to overlook minority communities in the census, leading to an inaccurate count.

“The idea is, if you have less time and less people, there’s going to be less counting,” Melissa Sherry, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said during a virtual hearing Friday.

Attorneys for the coalition said Friday that they didn’t want to comment on the Chicago case.

Meanwhile, the state of Louisiana on Friday said it was being harmed by the judge’s order preventing the Census Bureau from winding down operations. In a court filing asking to intervene in the coalition’s lawsuit, the state said if census officials were allowed to shutter operations in places where they had completed their work, they could redirect resources to states like Louisiana that are lagging behind in the count.

“That status quo has been upended,” the filing said.

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Follow Mike Schneider on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MikeSchneiderAP

By CASEY SMITH, IRENA HWANG and COLLIN BINKLEY

MUNCIE, Ind. (AP) — Just two weeks after students started returning to Ball State University last month, the surrounding county had become Indiana’s coronavirus epicenter.

Out of nearly 600 students tested for the virus, more than half have been positive. Dozens of infections have been blamed on off-campus parties, prompting university officials to admonish students.

University President Geoffrey Mearns wrote that the cases apparently were tied not to classrooms or dormitories but to “poor personal choices some students are making, primarily off campus.”

“The actions of these students are putting our planned on-campus instruction and activities at risk,” he said.

Similar examples abound in other college towns across the nation. Among the 50 large U.S. counties with the highest percentages of student residents, 20 have consistently reported higher rates of new virus cases than their states have since Sept. 1, according to an Associated Press analysis.

On average, infection rates in those 20 counties have been more than three times higher than their states’ overall rates.

At James Madison University in Virginia, which recently sent students home through September amid a surge in cases, the county is averaging a weekly infection rate of nearly 90 cases per 100,000 people, or more than eight times the statewide average.

Health officials fear that surges among college students will spread to more vulnerable people — older ones and those with underlying health problems — and trigger a new wave of cases and hospitalizations. Some worry that colleges could overwhelm hospitals already bracing for increasing cases of COVID-19 and flu this fall and winter.

“There’s this waiting game. Does it stay on college campuses or will it escape?” said Dr. Jeff Pothof, chief quality officer at the University of Wisconsin medical center in Madison, where cases among college students have been climbing.

While universities have emerged as hot spots in nearly every state, many of the worst outbreaks have been scattered across the South and Midwest. Of the 50 college counties analyzed by the AP, James Madison’s had the highest infection rate, followed by counties that are home to the University of Georgia, Florida State and Indiana University in Bloomington.

In the 10 counties with the highest infection rates, colleges have reported at least 15,000 cases among students and employees in recent weeks, though testing and reporting practices vary significantly and the actual number is probably much higher.

For many colleges, the return to campus was a carefully orchestrated process that took months to plan and millions of dollars to pull off. But as safe as they’ve made their campuses, many colleges have struggled to curb off-campus gatherings that have been tied to thousands of infections.

Parties were blamed for dozens of cases at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which brought students back in early August only to send them home weeks later.

Other schools have cracked down on parties and disciplined students. The University of Missouri in Columbia announced this week that it expelled two students and suspended three others for violating rules meant to slow the virus’s spread.

The outbreaks are increasingly straining relations between universities and their towns.

Amid a spike in cases at the University of Colorado at Boulder, county health authorities Tuesday urged all students to quarantine for two weeks. Students and others at the university have accounted for 76% of the county’s 663 positive cases over the past two weeks, officials said.

“More stringent and mandatory restrictions will be imposed if students do not comply and break the transmission cycle,” Jeffrey Zayach, executive director of Boulder County Public Health, warned in a letter to students.

In a letter to students, the school’s chancellor, Philip DiStefano, warned that the quarantine will be strictly enforced and that students who violate it could face suspension or other discipline. Already, DiStefano said, more than 400 students face university discipline for violating public health orders.

At Miami University in Ohio, county health authorities ordered all of the school’s athletes to isolate for 14 days last month after 27 tested positive for the virus. Last week, local police cited six men at an off-campus house party that included several students who had recently tested positive.

As cases increase at Boston College and the campus runs out of quarantine space, the mayor of nearby Newton is asking the school not to use any of the town’s hotels or other property to isolate students.

Some cities have tightened rules at bars to discourage students from gathering. As cases surged at Illinois State, the town’s mayor issued an order requiring all bar customers to be seated to be served. He also limited gatherings near campus to no more than 10 people.

Still, residents and officials in many college towns are rooting for universities to work through outbreaks and avoid campus closings that could further hurt the local economy.

Fred Pryce, who manages a series of stores in a strip mall near Ball State, said sending students home would hurt the area’s businesses “big time.”

“That’s 20,000-plus potential patrons that will vanish,” Pryce said. “There are ways to keep students in Muncie safely while they do their classes.”

Ball State, roughly 60 miles from Indianapolis, has about 22,000 students on a campus of red brick buildings and sleek, modern dorms in Muncie, where the university is the city’s second-largest employer after Ball Memorial Hospital.

On campus last week, sophomore La’Tricia Williams, wearing a mask, said she was glad to be back instead of sitting on the couch with her laptop at her family’s home, taking online classes.

“But I get that it comes with some risk,” she said. “You can give students a whole bunch of rules for what they should and shouldn’t do while they’re back at the school, but they’re not going to stop doing certain things here or going out into the community.”

Caleb Henry, a Ball State junior who lives off campus, said that he and other students have been frequenting local bars and meeting at friends’ houses but that he and most others are behaving responsibly, with masks and social distancing. He said students are being vilified unfairly.

“Everyone seems to be getting upset at college kids right now, accusing us of spreading the virus and making us out to be these highly infectious creatures that need to be sent home,” Henry said. “What about all the other people around town going to bars … having parties, weddings, whatever? We’re only doing the same things they are.”

As cases mounted at Ball State last month, the school tried to ban students from visiting dorms other than their own, but officials reversed the rule after a backlash from students. Even so, officials say infection rates have started to subside, and the school has no plans to suspend campus instruction.

While some colleges have sent students home amid outbreaks, many others are digging in. Some have moved classes online but urged students to stay where they are until cases drop. Among them is the University of Notre Dame, which paused in-person classes Aug. 18 and moved them online amid a surge that saw as many as 89 new cases per day. Weeks later, after a sharp decrease in infections, classes have started to resume on campus.

Other schools are hoping to replicate that success, including the University of Illinois, the University of Wisconsin and West Virginia University, which recently shifted classes online as the virus spread.

In a recent call with governors, Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, cautioned against sending students home, saying that could spark outbreaks elsewhere.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has also endorsed Notre Dame’s approach, saying colleges that “work through it” and find ways to isolate infected students are more likely to “end up in the best place.”

In a letter to students at Ball State this week, the university president thanked students for helping reduce virus rates. Still, he warned: “This data is not a cause for celebration. Rather, this data is a call for continued action.”

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Casey Smith is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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Hwang reported from Atlanta and Binkley reported from Boston.

By JAMES ANDERSON and MATTHEW BROWN

AP – Justin Silvera came off the fire lines in Northern California after a grueling 36 straight days battling wildfires and evacuating residents ahead of the flames. Before that, he and his crew had worked for 20 days, followed by a three-day break.

Silvera, a 43-year-old battalion chief with Cal Fire, California’s state firefighting agency, said he’s lost track of the blazes he’s fought this year. He and his crew have sometimes been on duty for 64 hours at a stretch, their only rest coming in 20-minute catnaps.

“I’ve been at this 23 years, and by far this is the worst I’ve seen,” Silvera said before bunking down at a motel for 24 hours. After working in Santa Cruz County, his next assignment was to head north to attack wildfires near the Oregon border.

His exhaustion reflects the situation up and down the West Coast fire lines: This year’s blazes have taxed the human, mechanical and financial resources of the nation’s wildfire fighting forces to an extraordinary degree. And half of the fire season is yet to come. Heat, drought and a strategic decision to attack the flames early combined with the coronavirus to put a historically heavy burden on fire teams.

“There’s never enough resources,” said Silvera, one of nearly 17,000 firefighters in California. “Typically with Cal Fire we’re able to attack — air tankers, choppers, dozers. We’re good at doing that. But these conditions in the field, the drought, the wind, this stuff is just taking off. We can’t contain one before another erupts.”

Washington State Forester George Geissler says there are hundreds of unfulfilled requests for help throughout the West. Agencies are constantly seeking firefighters, aircraft, engines and support personnel.

Fire crews have been summoned from at least nine states and other countries, including Canada and Israel. Hundreds of agreements for agencies to offer mutual assistance have been maxed out at the federal, state and local levels, he said.

“We know that there’s really nothing left in the bucket,” Geissler said. “Our sister agencies to the south in California and Oregon are really struggling.”

Demand for firefighting resources has been high since mid-August, when fire officials bumped the national preparedness level to critical, meaning at least 80% of crews were already committed to fighting fires, and there were few personnel and little equipment to spare.

Because of the extreme fire behavior, “you can’t say for sure having more resources would make a difference,” said Carrie Bilbao, a spokesperson for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise.

Andy Stahl, a forester who runs Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, an advocacy group in Oregon, said it would have been impossible to stop some of the most destructive blazes, a task he compared to “dropping a bucket of water on an atomic bomb.”

But Stahl contends the damage could have been less if government agencies were not so keen to put out every blaze. By stamping out smaller fires and those that ignite during wetter months, Stahl said officials have allowed fuels to build up, setting the stage for bigger fires during times of drought and hot, windy weather.

That’s been exacerbated this year by the coronavirus pandemic, which prompted U.S. Forest Service Chief Vickie Christiansen to issue a directive in June to fight all fires aggressively, reversing a decades-long trend of allowing some to burn. The idea was to minimize large concentrations of firefighters by extinguishing blazes quickly.

Fighting the flames from the air was key to the strategy, with 35 air tankers and 200 helicopters being used, Forest Service spokesperson Kaari Carpenter said.

Yet by Aug. 30, following the deaths of some firefighters, including four aviators, and several close calls, fire officials in Boise warned that long-term fatigue was setting in. They called for a “tactical pause” so fire commanders could reinforce safe practices.

Tim Ingalsbee, a member of the advocacy group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, said the June directive from Christiansen returned the forest service to a mindset prevalent for much of the last century that focused on putting out fires as quickly as possible. He said allowing more fires to burn when they are not threatening life or property would free up firefighters for the most dangerous blazes.

With no end in sight to the pandemic, Ingalsbee worried the focus on aggressively attacking every fire could prove lasting.

“More crews, more air tankers, more engines and dozers still can’t overcome this powerful force of nature,” he said. “The crews are beat up and fatigued and spread thin, and we’re barely halfway through the traditional fire season.”

Cal Fire’s roughly 8,000 personnel have been fighting blazes from the Oregon border to the Mexico border, repeatedly bouncing from blaze to blaze, said Tim Edwards, president of the union for Cal Fire, the nation’s second largest firefighting agency.

“We’re battle-hardened, but it seems year after year, it gets tougher, and at some point in time we won’t be able to cope. We’ll reach a breaking point,” said Edwards, a 25-year veteran.

The immediate dangers of the fires are compounded by worries about COVID in camp and at home.

Firefighters “see all this destruction and the fatigue, and then they’re getting those calls from home, where their families are dealing with school and child care because of COVID. It’s stressing them out, and we have to keep their heads in the game,” he said.

COVID also has limited the state’s use of inmate fire crews — either because of early inmate releases to prevent outbreaks in prisons or because many are under quarantine in those prisons, both Berland and Geissler said.

Aside from the human toll, the conflagrations in Colorado and Utah, New Mexico and Arizona, and now California and the Pacific Northwest have cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

California alone has spent $529 million since July 1 on wildfires, said Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director of Cal Fire. By comparison, the state spent $691 million the entire fiscal year that ended June 30. The U.S. government will reimburse most state costs for the biggest disasters.

Back in the field, Silvera and his crew saved two people at the beginning of their 26-day duty tour. The two hikers encountered the crew after the firefighters themselves were briefly trapped while trying to save the headquarters building at Big Basin Redwoods State Park.

“We got in a bad spot, and there were a few hours there we didn’t know if we’d make it,” Silvera said. “Those people found us, and we wouldn’t have been in there.”

“That’s what you sign up for.”