Coronavirus in rural America (Part XCVI): The impacts at both ends of the age spectrum, from nursing homes to schools

Here's a piece on rural nursing homes from the Wall Street Journal.  Tom McGinty and Anna Wilde Mathews report today:

Covid-19 deaths among vulnerable nursing-home residents are surging again, with the virus increasingly spreading to rural facilities that are struggling with staff shortages and other challenges.

Nursing homes reported more than 1,900 resident deaths from Covid-19 in the last week of October, as well as more than 32,000 confirmed and suspected cases among staff and residents, according to newly released federal data analyzed by The Wall Street Journal. Those nationwide totals at the facilities were the highest since early August, when states including Texas and Florida were seeing increases.

And here's one on rural schools, by Dan Levin in the New York Times.  In particular, it highlights the problem of rural broadband "dead zones," which has schools delivering lessons on a flash drive.  The dateline is Robeson County, North Carolina, population 134,000, and here's an excerpt focused on the digital divide:

The technology gap has prompted teachers to upload lessons on flash drives and send them home to dozens of students every other week. Some children spend school nights crashing at more-connected relatives’ homes so they can get online for classes the next day.

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Millions of American students are grappling with the same challenges, learning remotely without adequate home internet service. Even as school districts like the one in Robeson County have scrambled to provide students with laptops, many who live in low-income and rural communities continue to have difficulty logging on.

About 15 million K-12 students lived in households without adequate online connectivity in 2018, according to a study of federal data by Common Sense Media, an education nonprofit group that tracks children’s media use.

Before the coronavirus, that was mainly an obstacle for students doing homework, and it was an issue that state and federal officials struggled to address. But the pandemic turned the lack of internet connectivity into a nationwide emergency: Suddenly, millions of schoolchildren were cut off from digital learning, unable to maintain virtual “attendance” and marooned socially from their classmates.