Tablet to Tablet

For patients alone in Covid-19 wards, the tech connection is the next best thing to being face to face

Many of us can remember exactly what were and what we were doing when coronavirus became our new reality and life as we knew it was blown out of the water. For Williamsburg resident Yoely Friedman, he knew the pandemic was upon us when he saw sales quadrupling in his online electronics business as people scrambled to set up home offices.

The Satmar chassid and a father of six who has been in the electronics business for 12 years wasn’t overly concerned about Covid-19 at first, thinking of it as an issue that was mostly confined to China. And even when his own grandmother was hospitalized with the virus, she had been treated and was back home within three days. But all that changed when the number of Covid-19 fatalities within New York City’s Jewish community had grown so large that a list bearing the victims’ names had been created in order to keep track of the dead.

Things struck closer to home when Yoely’s aunt, a mother of 12 in her early fifties, was hospitalized with the virus. Yoely was frantic with worry, while the rest of the family thought he was overreacting.