I’ve been writing about how the pandemic is a causing hunger crisis in the poorer countries. The Los Angeles Times published an article predicting that the pandemic-induced economic crisis in these countries could cause more loss of life than the virus.
My fear is that the big institutions that have the means to mitigate these issues won’t do so until the death toll gets large.
My fear is that these crises will get too big to mitigate, as the underlying cause is an exponentially growing viral outbreak.
Just two months ago I posted Stay Home. The U.S. had fewer than 3,000 total cases that day. It had only hundreds of deaths. The country’s unemployment rate was under 4%. Just eight weeks later, over 80,000 Americans have died, over 20 million jobs have been lost, and in this richest of countries people literally line up for miles when food banks have big giveaways of food.
If we wait until 80,000 people have been counted as dead in India or Africa before we act, then 1+ million will be dead before any mitigation actually begins.
Here in Washington State we acted before the epidemic was horrific. We were once the hotspot for the U.S.A. We acted before it got bad and with that, our outbreak has stopped growing.
Back in Coronavirus: Hunger in Africa I predicted social distancing wouldn’t work in Africa. It hasn’t. With that, their epidemic is weeks away from catching up and surpassing the U.S. With that, now is the time to do something to help alleviate the hunger and economic catastrophe.
The sooner we act, the more leverage we have.
