ANKARA 

The Nigerian military took over streets and strategic locations in the capital Abuja on Monday amid ongoing protests in the country against the controversial Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) police unit, local media reported.  

The move comes a day before an annual exercise, Operation Crocodile Smile, which the military said would be conducted Tuesday, the Daily Post reported. 

In an earlier statement, the military said the operation was not targeted at the #EndSARS protests, according to the report. 

However, a number of video clips shared on social media have shown some Nigerian soldiers as well as police harassing protesters, according to the Daily Post. 

In a related development, the government of Edo state has imposed a 24-hour curfew statewide, the newspaper reported separately. 

The curfew took effect as of 4:00 p.m. Monday until further notice, according to the report. 

“This decision has become necessary because of the very disturbing incidents of vandalism and attacks on private individuals and institutions by hoodlums in the guise of the End SARS protests,” the Daily Post quoted the Secretary to the State Government, Osarodion Ogien, as saying in a statement. 

“While the government of Edo state respects the rights of its citizens to undertake legitimate protests, it cannot sit idly when hoodlums have taken laws into their hands to cause mayhem on innocent citizens and the state,” he added. 

Despite the disbanding of SARS in reaction to the angry protests, protests against what the demonstrators describe as police brutality continue in the country. 

Demonstrations had been taking place for several days against the unit, with protesters besieging its headquarters. 

They chanted “End SARS” and poured red paint on the street in front of the building – a symbolic reference to the killings they say that SARS officers have committed. SARS is also reportedly accused of torture and human rights abuses./aa

WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland is opening a field hospital at Warsaw's landmark national stadium and will bring in the army to handle drive-through coronavirus testing facilities amid a surge in new infections that threatens to overwhelm the healthcare system.

Officials said the Law and Justice (PiS) government was in talks with private medical facilities to provide beds and wards for coronavirus patients and planned to double the base salaries of state health workers.

Other major cities are also rushing to set up new hospitals, the health ministry said, after new daily cases reached nearly 10,000 last week. On Monday, 7,482 cases were reported, following a weekend downtick in testing.

Health Minister Adam Niedzielski said that in coming days new infections could surge to 20,000 a day if social distancing and other restrictions were not widely complied with.

"Of course, we are also preparing ... for the worst-case scenarios such as 15,000 or even 20,000 new infections (a day)," Niedzielski told a news conference.

The government has already urged citizens to stay at home, ordered gyms and pools to close, restaurants to reduce opening hours, and universities and secondary schools to shift to remote classes.

Despite the new measures, Niedzielski said the government had not decided to introduce any additional restrictions on people visiting family and friends' graves on Nov. 1, when millions of Poles remember their loved ones on All Saints' Day.

The PiS government was initially successful in containing the first wave of the pandemic in the spring, but has faced criticism from the opposition and doctors for failing to prepare the country for the second wave.

A poll by IBRIS for Wirtualna Polska news portal showed support for the conservative nationalist PiS has fallen by 5.5 percentage points to 36.1%, while backing for the biggest, centrist opposition group rose by 6 percentage points to 28.2%.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil edged lower on Monday, weighed by concerns over surging coronavirus cases globally and by Libya’s plan to boost output, but hopes for a U.S. fiscal package lent some support.

Analysts also focused on an OPEC+ ministerial monitoring committee meeting on Monday. Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said the committee recommended sticking in full to the group’s global deal to reduce oil production.

Brent crude futures fell 31 cents to settle at $42.62 a barrel. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures fell 5 cents to settle at $40.83 a barrel.

Saudi Arabia, the biggest member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, said no one should doubt the group’s commitment to providing support, while three sources from producing countries said a planned output increase from January could be reversed if necessary.

OPEC+, a grouping of OPEC and allies including Russia, is curbing oil production by 7.7 million barrels per day (bpd), down from cuts totalling 9.7 million bpd, and are due to reduce the cuts by a further 2 million bpd in January.

“There were no grand surprises out of the OPEC+ meeting,” said Phil Flynn, senior analyst at Price Futures Group in Chicago. “They said all the right things, but there were no big surprises so the market was fairly steady.”

Weighing on prices, Libya has significantly boosted its output after the easing of a blockade by eastern forces in September. The 70,000-bpd Abu Attifel oilfield was expected to begin its restart on Oct. 24 after being shut down for months, two engineers said.

Meanwhile, worldwide coronavirus cases crossed 40 million on Monday, according to a Reuters tally. Many European governments are tightening lockdowns to curb the spread of the virus, renewing concerns about oil demand.

“This latest swathe of stringent restrictions will inevitably impede economic growth and undermine the fuel demand recovery,” said Stephen Brennock of oil broker PVM.

Hopes for a new U.S. stimulus package lent some support to prices. The White House is “cautiously optimistic” that Democratic House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi may be moving toward making a deal on a new coronavirus stimulus bill, a spokeswoman said on Monday.

Bank of America projected Brent and WTI would average $44 and $40 per barrel in 2020, respectively, and $50 and $47 per barrel in 2021.

Meanwhile, China’s oil-buying frenzy earlier this year is expected to slow in the fourth quarter. Chinese refiners slowed their processing rates in September.

•       The US military's increasing need for fast transport explains why it keeps handing contracts to SpaceX, according to a leading aerospace expert.

•       Steve Nutt, professor in aerospace engineering, told Business Insider that SpaceX is the US' best alternative to "stodgy, slow" traditional contractors.

•       it comes at a time when the Department of Defense is "retooling" in light of growing global political tension, Nutt said.

•       "The rockets that SpaceX has been asked to supply would address that need — delivering hardware and support supplies rapidly to anywhere in the world," Nutt said.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has secured three military contracts in as many months — and one aerospace expert believes the deals won't end there.

The US Department of Defense (DoD) increasingly wants to transport supplies faster, according to Steve Nutt, professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Southern California.

SpaceX can fulfill that need at a time when the US military is "retooling" because of growing global political tensions, Nutt told Business Insider.

"The rockets that SpaceX has been asked to supply would address that need — delivering hardware and support supplies rapidly to anywhere in the world," Nutt said.

Traditional contractors have proven to be "so stodgy, slow, and expensive that SpaceX is the only alternative," he said.

In August, SpaceX won a slice of a billion-dollar agreement to launch new rockets for the Space Force. Two months later, it secured a $149 million Pentagon contract to make satellites that can track missiles.

Then, less than a week later, on October 8, the US military said it was teaming up with SpaceX to build a rocket capable of delivering weapons around the world at 7,500 mph.

A 7,652-mile journey from Florida to Afghanistan could be completed within about an hour with such a high-speed rocket, per The Times.

In comparison, a US C-17 Globemaster, a military transport aircraft costing $218 million with a maximum speed of 590 mph, would complete this journey in about 15 hours.

The DoD's need for speed is increasingly important given rising global political tensions between the US and other countries, such as North Korea, Nutt said.

"The days of heavily armored tanks and lumbering trucks are fading," Nutt said, as they are "too easy to target and destroy."

The DoD wants to be able "to deploy forces quickly, preferably without detection," said Nutt. It means that, theoretically, the military can quickly get in and out before enemy forces attack, reducing the risk of casualties and damage, he said.

"The US military are retooling and adjusting for future conflicts," said Nutt, adding: "Unfortunately, I think we're entering another arms race."

Business Insider

GAMPELA, Burkina Faso (AP) — The chain breaks here, in a tiny medical clinic in Burkina Faso that went nearly a year without a working refrigerator.

From factory to syringe, the world’s most promising coronavirus vaccine candidates need non-stop sterile refrigeration to stay potent and safe. But despite enormous strides in equipping developing countries to maintain the vaccine “cold chain,” nearly 3 billion of the world’s 7.8 billion people live where temperature-controlled storage is insufficient for an immunization campaign to bring COVID-19 under control.

The result: Poor people around the world who were among the hardest hit by the virus pandemic are also likely to be the last to recover from it.

The vaccine cold chain hurdle is just the latest disparity of the pandemic weighted against the poor, who more often live and work in crowded conditions that allow the virus to spread, have little access to medical oxygen that is vital to COVID-19 treatment, and whose health systems lack labs, supplies or technicians to carry out large-scale testing.

Maintaining the cold chain for coronavirus vaccines won’t be easy even in the richest of countries, especially when it comes to those that require ultracold temperatures of around minus 70 degrees Celsius (minus 94 F). Investment in infrastructure and cooling technology lags behind the high-speed leap that vaccine development has taken this year due to the virus.

With the pandemic now in its eighth month, logistics experts warn that vast parts of the world lack the refrigeration to administer an effective vaccination program. This includes most of Central Asia, much of India and southeast Asia, Latin America except for the largest countries, and all but a tiny corner of Africa.

The medical clinic outside Burkina Faso's capital, a dirt-streaked building that serves a population of 11,000, is a microcosm of the obstacles.

After its refrigerator broke last fall, the clinic could no longer keep vaccines against tetanus, yellow fever, tuberculosis and other common diseases on site, nurse Julienne Zoungrana said. Staff instead used motorbikes to fetch vials in insulated carriers from a hospital in Ouagadougou, making a 40-minute round-trip drive on a narrow road that varies between dirt, gravel and pavement.

A mother of two who visits the Gampela clinic says she thinks a coronavirus inoculation program will be challenging in her part of the world. Adama Tapsoba, 24, walks four hours under scorching sun to get her baby his routine immunizations and often waits hours more to see a doctor. A week earlier, her 5-month-old son had missed a scheduled shot because Tapsoba’s daughter was sick and she could only bring one child on foot.

“It will be hard to get a (COIVD-19) vaccine,” Tapsoba said, bouncing her 5-month-old son on her lap outside the clinic. “People will have to wait at the hospital, and they might leave without getting it.”

To uphold the cold chain in developing nations, international organizations have overseen the installation of tens of thousands of solar-powered vaccine refrigerators. Keeping vaccines at stable temperatures from the time they are made until they are given to patients also requires mobile refrigeration, reliable electricity, sound roads and, above all, advance planning.

For poor countries like Burkina Faso, the best chance of receiving a coronavirus vaccine is through the Covax initiative, led by the World Health Organization and the Gavi vaccine alliance. The goal of Covax is to place orders for multiple promising vaccine candidates and to allocate the successful ones equitably.

The United Nations' children's agency, UNICEF, began laying the global distribution groundwork months ago, in Copenhagen. At the world’s largest humanitarian aid warehouse, logistics staff are trying to foresee shortages by learning from the past, especially the spring chaos surrounding global shortages of masks and other protective gear that were commandeered off airport tarmacs or stolen and traded on the black market.

Currently, 42 coronavirus vaccine candidates are in clinical trials and another 151 are in pre-clinical evaluation, according to WHO. The ones most likely to end up in the Covax mix must be stored at 2 to 8 degrees Celsius (25-46 F).

A Pfizer candidate is among the ones in advanced testing requiring storage at ultracold temperatures. The company, which has designed a special carrying case for its vaccine, has expressed interest in Covax and signed contracts with the United States, Europe and Japan.

Medical freezers that go down to minus 70 degrees Celsius are rare even in U.S. and European hospitals. Many experts believe the West African countries that suffered through a 2014-16 Ebola outbreak may be the best positioned, because a vaccine against that virus also requires ultracold storage.

For more than two-thirds of the world, however, the advanced technology is nowhere on the horizon, according to a study by German logistics company DHL. Meanwhile, billions of people are in countries that don't have the necessary infrastructure to maintain the cold chain for either existing vaccines or more conventional coronavirus candidates, the study said.

Opportunities for vaccines to be lost expand the farther a vaccine travels. DHL estimated that 15,000 cargo flights would be required to vaccinate the entire planet against COVID-19, stretching global capacity for aircraft and potentially supplies of materials such as dry ice.

“We need to find a bridge” for every gap in the cold chain, DHL chief commercial officer Katja Busch said. “We’re talking about investments ... as a society, this is something we have to do.”

Gavi and UNICEF worked before the pandemic to supply much of Africa and Asia with refrigeration for vaccines, fitting out 40,000 facilities since 2017. UNICEF is now offering governments a checklist of what they will need to maintain a vaccine supply chain and asking them to develop a plan.

“The governments are in charge of what needs to happen in the end,” said Benjamin Schreiber, who is among the directors of UNICEF’s vaccination program.

Cracks in the global cold chain start once vaccines leave the factory. Container ships are not equipped to refrigerate pharmaceutical products with a limited shelf life. Shipping vaccines by air costs a lot more, and air cargo traffic is only now rebounding from pandemic-related border closures.

Even when flights are cold and frequent enough, air freight carries other potential hazards. WHO estimates that as much as half of vaccines globally are lost to wastage, sometimes due to heat exposure or vials breaking while in transit. With coronavirus vaccines, which will be one of the world’s most sought-after products, theft is also a danger.

“They can’t be left on a tarmac and fought over because they would actually be spoiled and they would have no value — or worse still, people would still be trying to distribute them,” said Glyn Hughes, the global head of cargo for the International Air Transport Association.

Tinglong Dai, a Johns Hopkins University researcher who specializes in health care logistics, said creativity will be needed to keep the cold chain intact while coronavirus vaccines are distributed on a global scale. Gavi and UNICEF have experimented with delivering vaccines by drone. Indian officials have floated the idea of setting aside part of the country’s vast food storage network for the coronavirus vaccines.

“If people can figure out how to transport ice cream, they can transport vaccines,” Dai said.

Temperature-sensitive labels that change color when a vaccine is exposed to heat too long and no longer safe to use, and live delivery tracking to ensure vaccines reach their destinations as intended also have allowed for progress in delivering safe shots.

Yet chances for something to go wrong multiply on the ground as vaccines are prepped to leave national depots. Since the cold chain is so fragile, logistics planning is crucial; syringes and disposal boxes must be available as soon as vaccine shipments arrive.

By the end of the year, UNICEF expects to have 520 million syringes pre-positioned for coronavirus vaccines in the developing world and maps of where the refrigeration needs are greatest "to ensure that these supplies arrive in countries by the time the vaccines do,” Executive Director Henrietta Fore said.

The last vaccine requiring cold storage that India’s national program adopted was for rotavirus, a stomach bug that typically affects babies and young children. Dr. Gagandeep Kang, who led the research for that vaccine, estimated that India has about 30% less storage capacity than it would need for a coronavirus vaccine.

In countries such as India and Burkina Faso, a lack of public transportation presents another obstacle to getting citizens inoculated before vaccines go bad.

Dr. Aquinas Edassery, who runs two clinics in one of India's poorest and least developed regions, said patients must walk for hours to receive health care. The trip on a single road that winds 86 kilometers (53 miles) over steep hills and washes out for months at a time will pose an insurmountable barrier for many residents of the eastern district of Rayagada, Edassery said.

As with most logistics, the last kilometer (mile) is the hardest part of delivering a coronavirus vaccine to the people who need it. In Latin America, perhaps nowhere more than Venezuela provides a glimpse into how the vaccine cold chain could go dramatically off course.

When a blackout last year left much of the nation in the dark for a week, doctors in several parts of Venezuela reported losing stocks of vaccines. The country’s largest children’s hospital had to discard thousands of doses of vaccines for illnesses like diphtheria, according to Dr. Huníades Urbina, head of the Venezuelan Society of Childcare and Pediatrics.

“We won’t be able to halt either the coronavirus or measles,” Urbina said.

Preserving the cold chain has only grown more difficult since then. Gas shortages limit the ability to move vaccines quickly from one part of Venezuela to another. Dry ice to keep vaccines cool during transport is harder to find. And after years of economic decline, there also are fewer doctors and other professionals trained to keep the chain intact.

“I’m not optimistic on how the vaccine would be distributed in the inner states because there is no infrastructure of any kind to guarantee delivery — or if it gets delivered, guarantees the adequate preservation under cold conditions,” Dr. Alberto Paniz-Mondolfi, a Venezuelan pathologist, said.

Venezuela presents an extreme example, but a coronavirus vaccine also is likely to test parts of Latin America with more robust health care systems. In Peru, private businesses that typically transport fish and beef have offered their trucks, though it remains unclear whether the Health Ministry will accept.

Back in Burkina Faso, vaccination days became an ordeal at the Gampela clinic when the refrigerator went out, said Zoungrana, the nurse. Staff members on hospital courier runs must buy fuel they often can’t afford and make a second trip to and from the capital to return any unused doses.

“We’re suffering,” said Zoungrana, who was run off the road on her motorbike just a few weeks ago.

Days after journalists from The Associated Press visited the clinic this month, a long-awaited solar refrigerator arrived. With technicians in short supply, the clinic was waiting to be sure the appliance would function properly before stocking it with vaccines.

Nationwide, Burkina Faso is about 1,000 clinical refrigerators short, and less than 40% of the health facilities that conduct vaccinations have reliable fridges, national vaccination director Issa Ouedraogo said.

Multi-dose vials — the equivalent of bulk storage for vaccines — can drastically reduce global transportation costs. But once a vial is opened, its shelf life counts down even faster; if too few people show up for their jabs in time, whatever remains in the larger vials must be discarded.

“It’s really upsetting to have wastage like that. It’ll result in loss of lives and pain and suffering. It’s a waste of resources, ” said University of Massachusetts at Amherst professor Anna Nagurney, who studies supply chain logistics.

For now, UNICEF is betting on 20-dose vials of coronavirus vaccine and hoping that the amount wasted will stay below 3% for closed vials and 15% for open multi-dose vials that do not get used up, according to Michelle Siedel, one of the U.N. agency’s cold chain experts.

If Burkina Faso were given 1 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine today, the country wouldn’t be able to handle it, Jean-Claude Mubalama, UNICEF’s head of health and nutrition for the African nation.

“If we had to vaccinate against the coronavirus now, at this moment, it would be impossible,” he said.

CAIRO (AP) — Egyptian authorities released a comedian, who was working for a popular satirical television program, after more than two years in prison without trial, a rights lawyer said Sunday.

Attorney Mokhtar Mounir said Shady Abu Zaid was released from a Cairo police station late Saturday, but as part of his terms of release must report to a police station twice a week.

His sister, Roula Abu Zaid, confirmed the news in a Facebook post and shared a photo of the siblings and their friends at home after his release.

Police arrested Abu Zaid in May 2018 after plain-clothed security officers raided his house in Cairo. He was charged with joining an outlawed group, a reference to the banned Muslim Brotherhood, and disseminating false news.

Earlier this month, a court ordered his conditional release after he exceeded the allowed two-year period for pretrial detention.

Abu Zaid was working on camera for a satirical program whose host was a puppet named Abla Fahita. The show has since been canceled. Before his arrest, he also produced a show called “The Rich Content” that was popular on social media networks.

In 2016, he attracted controversy for handing out balloons made of inflated condoms to police officers on the fifth anniversary of the 2011 uprising that toppled former President Hosni Mubarak and had been aimed at reforming the state's heavy-handed security apparatus.

Abu Zaid was one of many government critics behind bars in Egypt amid a years-long crackdown by the government of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi on the media. More than 60 journalists are in jail in Egypt, according to the International Press Institute, with the country ranked among the world’s worst jailers of journalists.

Every weekday morning, Paul Yenne sets up five different devices — including two laptops, an iPhone and a screen-caster that projects videos to a large screen — to get ready for the 19 fifth-grade students who come to his classroom and the six who log on from home.

The Colorado school district where Yenne works offers in-person and online classes simultaneously, with one teacher responsible for both as the Covid-19 pandemic touches every facet of education.

Yenne, 31, delivers the day’s lesson, his eyes continuously darting between the students in front of him and those stacked on a virtual grid on a laptop at the front of the room.

Despite his desire to create a seamless classroom experience for both groups, one inevitably gets left out, he said. If the technology breaks down, his classroom students have to wait until he fixes it, and if there's an in-person issue, it's the other way around, he said.

“The most exhausting thing is just to try and hold attention in two different places and give them at least somewhat equal weight,” he said. “What kind of wears on me the most is just thinking, 'I don't know that I did the best for every kid,' which is what I try and do every day when I go in."

While most K-12 schools have chosen to go either online or in person at one time, the double duty model is among the most labor-intensive, according to education experts. Yet it's increasingly becoming the new norm around the country, and with less than a quarter of the school year down, many teachers say they're already exhausted.

They have received little training and resources are scarce, they say, but they worry that speaking up could cost them their jobs.

”I think that kind of exhaustion we had from last year has kind of compounded as now we're being asked to do essentially two jobs at once,” Yenne said. “The big question right now is, 'How long can we continue doing this?'"

Afraid to speak out

While many schools call this form of teaching “hybrid,” experts label it “concurrent teaching” or “hyflex," modes originally designed for university and graduate-level students.

Brian Beatty, an associate professor at San Francisco State University who pioneered the hyflex program, said it was designed to have more than a single mode of interaction going on in the same class and typically involves classroom and online modes that can be synchronous or asynchronous.

The aim was to provide students not in the classroom with as good an educational experience as those who were, and it was intended for students who chose to be taught that way on a regular or frequent basis, he said. The model was created for adults at the undergraduate and graduate level who made the choice and were able to manage themselves.

“The context of the situation at the elementary level is so different than the situation that we designed this for," he said. "A lot of the principles can work but challenges are also a lot more extreme, especially around managing students.”

Image: New York City School Children Return To In-Person Classes (Michael Loccisano / Getty Images)

Sophia Smith, a literary enrichment teacher for kindergarten through third-grade students in Des Plaines, Illinois, said her elementary school allowed little time for training and planning before teachers were thrust into the dual mode.

She said 40 percent of her students are online, and she spends much of her time going back and forth between online and classroom students, leaving little time for meaningful instruction.

"It's extremely chaotic," she said, adding that if school officials were to visit her classroom, they would understand how their decisions about hybrid education really affected teachers.

Smith worries the model will become an accepted norm, mostly because teachers who are struggling to keep up are scared to speak out.

“We're afraid to lose our jobs," she said. "We're afraid that the district will come back and treat us differently or say things differently, like, 'Nobody else is complaining, so why is it you?'"

Smith said she is speaking up now because she wants other teachers to feel more comfortable doing so.

Matthew Rhoads, an education researcher and author of "Navigating the Toggled Term: Preparing Secondary Educators for Navigating Fall 2020 and Beyond," said schools added a livestream component to their curriculum in a panicked effort to offer an online choice to families. But much of the implementation was not thought out, he said, leaving teachers to deal with the fallout.

Teachers are beyond exhausted, said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers unions in the country.

“This is the worst of all worlds,” she said. “The choice to do that came down to money and convenience, because it certainly wasn’t about efficacy and instruction.”

Long-term consequences

David Finkle, a ninth-grade teacher at a Florida high school, said he has not been able to sleep despite being depleted of energy after a full day of online and in-person instruction. The veteran teacher of nearly 30 years stopped running, writing creatively and doing any of the other activities he enjoys when school began in August.

“It's been very hard for me to focus on my other creative stuff outside of school because school is wiping me out," he said, adding that it's difficult to keep up with grading because it takes so long to plan lessons for the two groups.

"I wish I could focus on one set of students," he said.

Teachers are reporting high levels of stress and burnout around the country, including in Kansas, Michigan and Arkansas. In Utah, the Salt Lake Tribune reported, principals say their teachers are having panic attacks while juggling both.

High levels of teacher stress affect not only students and their quality of education, but the entire profession, said Christopher McCarthy, chair of the educational psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin.

"When teachers are under a lot of stress, they are also a lot more likely to leave the profession, which is a very bad outcome," he said.

Already, 28 percent of educators said the Covid-19 pandemic has made them more likely to retire early or leave the profession, according to a nationwide poll of educators published in Augustby the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers union.

Rhoads, the education researcher, said retaining high-caliber teachers is crucial, especially now, but if the hyflex model continues without adequate support, a mass teacher shortage is inevitable.

Such an event would have far-reaching effects, accelerating school district consolidations and causing some states to lower their standards and licensing requirements for teachers, he said.

For instance, the Missouri Board of Education passed an emergency rule in anticipation of a pandemic-related teacher shortage that made it easier to become a substitute. Instead of 60 hours of college credit, eligible substitutes need only a high school diploma, to complete a 20-hour online training course and pass a background check, according to the Associated Press.

Iowa relaxed relaxed coursework requirements and lowered the minimum age for newly hired substitutes from 21 to 20, the AP reported, and in Connecticut, college students have been asked to step in as substitutes.

Supporting teachers

Paige, a middle school teacher in central Florida who did not want her full name used to protect her job, said teachers at her school received less than a week’s notice that they would be teaching in the classroom and online concurrently. They received no training on platforms or logistics, she said.

Since the beginning of the year, she has struggled with internet accessibility and technical glitches.

“We need greater bandwidth," she said. "I have five kids turn on the camera and suddenly nothing is working in real time anymore. We need more devices."

She said teachers doing double duty should receive improved products, technology training and professional guidance and mentorship. Other teachers said having a day or even half a day for planning would help.

McCarthy, the educational psychologist, said the best support teachers can get when demands are high are the resources to deal with the challenges.

"What's happening right now is lack of resources mixed with a lot of uncertainty," he said, "and that is a toxic blend."