What we do with it

By Dave Beers

Most of us use the Internet in many aspects of our life. The pandemic is making some of those uses more vital to our health and livelihood. Many of us are now working from home more and working from Norfolk more, rather than in the city. 

Starling Childs, CEO of Citiesense land-use planning services and software, moved from Manhattan to Norfolk at the start of the pandemic. From Norfolk, Childs is sharing and collaborating with clients using large data files, apps, cloud-based computing and videoconferencing. Immediately after moving, Childs switched from DSL to cable Internet service that he says is faster and more responsive than the Internet he has at his midtown Manhattan apartment. He says he pays $78 per month to Xfinity for the service. 

I am also working at home more, logging on to our main office computer in Middlefield every day using the same Xfinity service as Childs. I use a remote desktop app called Splashtop. To get a good, fast reliable connection, I find I need to connect to our main computer during off-peak hours. Connecting during peak hours (afternoon and evening) is slow, and I often lose my connection. I am not sure whether this is a problem on my end, or with the Wi-Fi connection at the Middlefield office, or both. Both ends use the same cable Internet service.

Karen Wilson is a health program associate for the state Department of Public Health and has been working from her Norfolk home since the pandemic. Wilson uses Office 365 to work online in the state’s cloud server and to conduct meetings as part of licensing and training health workers, investigating health violations and responding to complaints. Her satellite Internet service is hit or miss, with miss more often than hit. When Wilson tries to videoconference at home, she has to make sure the rest of her family remains offline. She often has to drive down the road to use her cell phone for calls and meetings because her north Norfolk home has almost nonexistent cell service. Because of her remote location, cable and DSL are not an option. Wilson finds that early morning online work is best. By the time all U.S. time zones have entered their workday at 11 a.m. EDT, heavy online traffic slows everything down and online work becomes difficult.

Virginia Coleman-Prisco, assistant professor at Mercy College, has been using online learning to teach undergraduates for 20 years. She was tasked with giving less computer savvy professors a crash course in online learning when the pandemic started. From her Norfolk home, Coleman-Prisco puts prerecorded lectures and homework assignments on to a learning management system called Blackboard and combines this with one-to-one videoconferencing with students. She says that proctored, closed-book testing of factual knowledge is becoming nearly impossible to conduct online owing to Covid-19 social distancing requirements. While there is still time-limited open-book testing, today’s students are evaluated more on their presentation of critical thinking and problem solving. Coleman-Prisco uses the highest-speed cable service Xfinity provides to Norfolk and has found the service adequate for what she does as long as her kids and husband stay offline while she is online with her students.

Laura Thomas, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Winsted, had never done any online work before the pandemic. The pandemic temporarily forced her counseling sessions online. Her schedule has remained full. She retained 98 percent of her pre-pandemic clients and has brought on many new ones. She uses a HIPAA-compliant app called SimplePractice. This app allows Thomas to both video- and audio-conference her clients and also collect health information from them. She has found online work to be more effective than she thought it would be, and she thinks it will now be part of her toolbox after the pandemic. Some of Thomas’s clients have issues with finding a private quiet place for a counseling session or have a poor Internet connection at home. Thomas says that both problems have been solved by clients using their phone in their car at a place with good Wi-Fi, like a library.

Norfolk resident Ruth Melville recently had her annual physical with her primary care practitioner on Zoom. She found the appointment more personal than past in-office appointments. There were less distractions and background noise. She found conversing with the practitioner easier, with more attention focused on what she was saying. And it is not just physicals that are online: Melville has a friend who recently had an online appointment for the doctor to get a close-up look at a tick bite and then prescribe an antibiotic. 

Online telehealth services have catapulted from being a novelty to a routine occurrence in the past couple of months. These services require less appointment time and travel time, allow patients to more easily see specialists that are far away and allow for more frequent and consistent monitoring of chronic health conditions. Before the pandemic, most public and private health insurers had limited coverage of telehealth services. That has completely changed, with Medicare, Medicaid, CT Husky and most private insurers now fully covering these online medical services, using commonly available apps like Facetime, Skype and Zoom. Doctors are able to have patients measure their own blood pressure, blood sugar, dissolved oxygen, pulse and temperature; do some tactile tests; and use cameras to light up and zoom in on parts of the body. Of course, telehealth cannot do it all, and sometimes a telehealth appointment needs to be followed up by an in-person visit to the doctor.

Using the Internet to work, play and stay healthy from home has become more of the norm in the past three months and will likely stay that way after the pandemic. And as technology improves, what we will expect from our home Internet connection will only increase.