“Digital divide of US households without internet”

“Data from Pew Research Center shows large swaths of the U.S. are trying to cope without a household internet connection while much of the country hunkers down to work and shop from home.

“Before coronavirus hit the U.S., about 7% of private-industry workers had access to a flexible workplace benefit, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those jobs tend to pay well, which helps explain why access to telework varies sharply by income, according to the Pew Research Center.

“Lack of internet access has also left millions of households cut off from vital services and information during the pandemic,” by Melodie Warner, John Schoen, CNBC. Read more

Coronavirus Cases, Concentrated on the Coasts, Now Threaten America’s Middle

“A second wave of coronavirus cases is charting a path far from coastal Washington State, California, New York and New Jersey, and threatening population centers in America’s middle. Emerging hot spots include smaller communities like Greenville, Miss., and Pine Bluff, Ark., and large cities like New Orleans, Milwaukee, Detroit and Chicago.”

“As the threat expands, the orders from state and local officials have sometimes been a chaotic, confusing patchwork. With mixed signals from the federal authorities in Washington, D.C., local leaders have wrestled with complicated medical and economic choices. Mayors and governors in Oklahoma, Massachusetts, South Carolina and Texas have clashed over which restrictions to impose on residents, dispensing contradictory instructions, even as their communities are being ravaged by the virus.”

“In Mississippi, the state government had largely resisted calls to put in place regulations around the virus. That had led to a jumble of regulations, as mayors of cities in Oxford, Jackson and Tupelo closed bars and restaurants and established shelter orders not much different than the rules in Houston, New Orleans, New York, Boston or San Francisco.

“‘You can only go so far with leading from below,‘ said Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba of Jackson, the capital, which has more than 31 confirmed infections. ‘We need the state,'” by Julie Bosman, The New York Times. Read more