School Campuses Will Not Reopen This School Year

BREAKING NEWS
By Patric Hedlund, TME

California’s Governor Gavin Newsom announced April 1 as we were going to press that school campuses will be closed for the rest of this school year in all of California. He said, “We will continue educating our kids via distance learning.” He added that “we will also continue feeding our kids.”

The governor said the state has secured a federal government waiver that will offer “significantly greater access to food programs” for the state’s children with food insecurity.

Newsom said this is the largest school system in the United States, with six million students, and that access to curricula and equipment for distance learning is a top priority. “Schools are closed, but classes are still on,” Newsom said, announcing that “Google has stepped up to provide 100,000 points of access to improve widespread access for rural and low-income families to high-quality WiFi and broadband.”

He said there would be a minimum of three months’ free access to these services “to significantly address the Digital Divide.” That will be accompanied by distribution of thousands of Chromebooks to assist with this access.

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Kern County officials in Bakersfield declared a local health emergency on Monday, March 30. As we go to press, in Kern County, there is one death and 129 positives out of 3,640 tests for…(please see below to view full stories and photographs)

Photo captions:

The goal of sheltering in place is to slow the rate of contagion during this epidemic. Less contact with others results in less infection. In this chart, the straight horizontal line shows the Phase One Surge that will require 50,000 Intensive Care Unit (ICU) hospital beds. About 66,000 beds will be needed toward the end of May, medical consultant Dr. Galli said; 40% of them will need to be ICU beds. Ventilators are key. “If we can bend the curve further down, we may be able to buy the time” said Galli. The Phase One goal is 10,000 ventilators. The state currently has about 4,250. Newsom said. 34,000 credentialed medical people have registered at HealthCorps.ca.gov to assist with medical care in the surge phase.

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This is part of the April 3, 2020 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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