March 2021 marked one year since the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous editorials reflected on social inequality, a longstanding problem in lifelong education, in light of the pandemic (Waller et al., 2020), and on the role of learning cities and regions to make education systems resilient to the pandemic (Webb et al., 2020). Writing when a third wave of COVID-19 is being experienced in several countries, it is worth reflecting on possible lessons to be learned from the exposed fragility of education and digital in/equalities witnessed since March 2020.