White House identifies 206 people possibly exposed to COVID at Trump fundraiser

[BumRushDaShow]

54. For my sister's kids (both living in the suburbs)

one sister has a younger daughter who is just starting high school, and the school is "all virtual" (for now), and they were automatically given chromebooks to use. And for my other sister, her son is in a private Catholic school and is "in person" for first grade. I think the age definitely matters as they are finding out, where because our modern society has not been raised with "home-schooling" or any concept or accommodation for such, outside of a small subset of communities, then the youngest of children need to receive some kind of structured in-person learning, in order to be able to eventually fully participate in how are society is set up and its expectations.

But the biggest issue, which is one that has been talked about literally for almost 30 years - "the digital divide" - is now front and center. Advocates have been tirelessly sounding the alarm year after year but their exhortations were not really considered a priority because "the internet" was generally perceived as something frivolous and was primarily used for entertainment by the main populace, along with certain entities like colleges, government, businesses, and the military, who were utilizing it to provide certain services.

Now that you have the "virtual classroom" thanks to the pandemic, they are seeing first hand, what the advocates have decried for years - there is a significant number in the population who not only don't have some kind of internet service (whether dial-up or broadband and mostly because they could not afford it), but they don't even have a computer in their household. Their only "home" access might be via a pre-paid cell phone with limited internet service, that is capped and generally lower-bandwith.

The city of Philadelphia had to go out and buy (or have donated), and distribute 40,000 chromebooks to provide to students who had no computer in their homes - and this often meant several per household because there were siblings in that single household, with no way to "share" when classes are real-time online, and these children were in different grades, and attended different schools. And the city also had to cajole Comcast (who is headquartered here and who owns the 2 tallest towers in the city) into providing free and/or reduced-cost broadband access (meaning having to go house to house to wire people up in their residence - the outdoor taps have been there for years), and/or provide some kind of hotspot, so that the kids could get online and do their Google Meet or Zoom learning.