The hunger virus is scarier than COVID-19

Big Media constantly scares us with various universal catastrophes. Today, two main threats to humanity are in the first places: the COVID-19 virus and global warming on the planet. I remember that in March last year, when the WHO announced the COVID-19 pandemic, officials of this organisation said that the mortality rate of those infected with the virus could be 3.4%.

In terms of absolute figures, this meant that the current pandemic could surpass the well-known "Spanish flu" in terms of the number of victims (the flu pandemic that claimed about 50 million human lives in 1918-1920).

At the moment (mid-August 2021), according to Johns Hopkins University, which is confirmed by the WHO, the total number of deaths from coronavirus in the world was 4.34 million people. I'm not even touching on the question of how much these figures can be trusted. But even this figure shows that last year's "alarmists" overestimated the expected mortality from the pandemic by at least an order of magnitude.

It is noteworthy that, giving terrible estimates of the deaths expected in the future from the coronavirus (as well as from climate warming), Big Media and many WHO officials stopped paying attention to those deaths that occur "here and now". For example, the WHO recently published an estimate of excess mortality in the world by the end of 2020.

We are talking about the excess of the death rate last year compared to the figure for the year before last. Excess mortality was 3 million people. The total mortality from COVID-19 last year was 1.8 million people. The excess mortality rate of last year was attributed to it. But there are still 1.2 million human deaths that are not covered by this cause, the origin of which has not yet been clearly explained by WHO.

In fact, the estimate of excess mortality of 3 million, made by the WHO, greatly underestimates the increase in mortality. There are estimates of experts who call the figures of excess mortality of 6-8 million. The WHO focused the attention of the world community on the "pandemic", and everything else went behind the scenes. And there are a lot of interesting and scary things behind the scenes.

Only very few experts paid attention to the causes of excess mortality that are not related to COVID-19. Among such reasons, perhaps, the growing hunger in the world can be put in the first place. Let's talk about this growing threat.

Exactly a year ago, in August 2020, the head of the World Food Program, David M. Beasley, said that hunger in the world could reach "biblical proportions".

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the topic of "hunger" and "malnutrition" is a constant on the agenda of many international organisations. Such as UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund), UNWFP (the United Nations World Food Program), FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation), IFAD (the International Fund for Agricultural Development), and the World Health Organisation (WHO).

But at the same time, hunger in the world is perceived mainly as a socio-economic problem. Such a key aspect of the problem as mortality due to constant hunger and malnutrition is far from central. Even in the perception of WHO.

The issue of statistical coverage of the problem of hunger in the world deserves attention. Due to the fact that different international organisations do not have uniform criteria for what is considered "hunger" and "malnutrition", there is a great discrepancy in their statistics.

Here, for example, is the FAO report "The state of food security and nutrition in the world 2020". It provides the following figures of hungry and malnourished people in the world (millions of people; in parentheses - the share of the total world population, as a %): 2005 – 825.6 (12.6); 2014-628.9 (8.6); 2018 – 678.1 (8.9); 2019– 687.8 (8.9); 2020 – 768.0 (9.9).

As we can see, during the period of 2005-2014, there was an absolute and relative decrease in the number of hungry and malnourished people in the world. And then some growth of the absolute number began.

In 2020, there was a sharp jump – the number of hungry and malnourished people increased by more than 80 million people in one year (by 11.6%). And their share in the total population of the Earth has reached almost 10%. According to the FAO report, the reason for this jump is explained almost exclusively by lockdowns in the economies of many countries of the world, a drop in global GDP, and the loss of people's jobs and income.

There are also other figures. Here is a recent UN report with a foreword by the Secretary-General of this organisation, Antonio Guterres, which is called "Global Report on Food Crises 2020". It says that last year, starvation affected 155 million people worldwide in 55 countries and jurisdictions.

An increase in the number of hungry people by about 20 million (by 14.8%) over the year. These are people who, as the report notes, are in a state of "crisis or worse”. The distribution of this contingent by region is as follows (millions of people): Africa - 97.9; Middle East - 24.9; South Asia - 15.6; Central America - 11.8; Eastern Europe - 0.6.

The figures given from two sources for the number of hungry people in the world vary greatly: respectively, 768 million and 155 million people (in 2020). The difference is almost fivefold. Probably, we are talking about different gradations of hunger. The figure of 155 million people reflects the number of those who are really in a critical situation and can die at any time.

And here is another figure. The already mentioned David Beasley, head of the UN World Food Program, speaking at a special session of the UN General Assembly in December 2020, said that the number of hungry people in the world has doubled by the end of the year and reached 270 million people.

Although estimates of the extent of hunger in the world vary greatly, however, all sources confirm that last year there was a sharp jump in the number of people deprived of food necessary for maintaining life and health. The death rate from hunger is already increasing.

And here a very important question arises: there are statistics on the number of hungry people (although very contradictory), but are there statistics on people dying of hunger? As it turns out, no international organisation has such statistics. Even the WHO doesn't have it. And WHO officials explain this very simply: how can we take into account the death rate from hunger if there are no medical diagnoses of "died of hunger"?

Yes, the person died of malnutrition, but they will be diagnosed with some other diagnosis. And in the same Africa, where health care and doctors are bad, they may not make any diagnosis at all. And even death is not registered. In a word, there is no methodology or mechanism for accounting for those who died of hunger today. And if there are no statistics on those who died of hunger, then there is no problem. This is not statistics on morbidity and mortality from coronavirus (or with coronavirus).

In this case, every person is under the "scope" of any medical supervision. Even in Africa, statistics of cases and deaths from COVID-19 have been established. But for some reason, it does not occur to officials from the WHO and other specialised UN bodies to establish records of those who died with a diagnosis of "died of hunger".

The need for statistics on mortality from hunger is high. And many researchers, without waiting for the official statistics to appear, make their own expert assessments. The most detailed and large-scale study to date is the following study: "Global Burden of Disease Study 2017 (GBD 2017) Results". The study was carried out by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), USA (Seattle).

The paper provides indicators of mortality from hunger per 100,000 people of the population around the world, individual regions, most of the countries and jurisdictions. There is data for two years - 1990 and 2017. In the whole world, the death rate from hunger in 1990 was 8.99. In 2017, it has already fallen to 3.32.

This is very noticeable progress in reducing the relative mortality rate from hunger for 28 years. For the group of economically developed countries, the figures were 0.51 and 0.45, respectively. And for the economically most backward countries - 30.54 and 8.82, respectively.

As we can see, the progress in the fight against starvation has been particularly impressive in the poorest countries. I should immediately note that the death rates from hunger in this study are greatly underestimated. If we start from the global mortality rate of 3.32 (the number of people who died of hunger in the world in 2017), then we will get the absolute value of those who died of hunger in the world, equal to 249.3 thousand people.

The authors of the study do not disclose the methodology for calculating the death rate from hunger, but it is obvious that the indicators are greatly (repeatedly) underestimated. This can be judged by comparing the IHME study with other expert assessments. Meanwhile, the IHME study is still useful, because it helps to compare individual countries by mortality rates. Identify countries with high, medium and low mortality from hunger.

In the group of countries with the highest relative mortality were such countries as Madagascar (57.41); Eritrea (33.12); the CAR (33.24); South Sudan (27.16); Zimbabwe (25.52) Burundi (25.35); Mali (23.16); Somalia (22.79); Chad (20.22); Guinea (19.26); Sierra Leone (18.39) Guatemala (18.27); Democratic Republic of the Congo (17.30); Burkina Faso (17.28); Kenya (15.74); Rwanda (14.30), etc. As you can see, almost all the "record holders" are African countries.

But the values of the indicator in countries with a large population: China - 0.62; India - 2.12; Brazil - 3.23; Indonesia - 8.37; Mexico - 5.09.

It turns out that in the countries of the "Big Seven" there was also a death rate from hunger. Here is the data: USA - 0.69; Canada - 0.33; Japan - 0.26; France - 1.29; Germany - 0.12; Italy - 0.12; Great Britain - 0.07. As you can see, there is a very large spread in the group of the most economically developed countries: the figure for France is more than 18 times higher than the figure for the UK. It should also be noted that the death rate from hunger in the United States is higher than in China.

In the group of European countries that are considered to be the most "prosperous", there is also a death rate from hunger: Switzerland - 0.20; Denmark - 0.26; Sweden - 0.30; Norway - 0.32; Luxembourg - 0.40; Belgium - 0.68. It turns out that some European "samples of well-being" have a relative death rate from hunger higher than, say, Cuba (0.27).

There are many countries around the world where the relative mortality from hunger is lower than in the "prosperous" countries of Europe. The most prosperous countries in terms of low mortality from hunger are Austria, Slovenia, Greece, Kuwait, and Singapore. Their figure is 0.01.

Against the background of all the "prosperous" countries, Russia also looks very prosperous with an indicator equal to only 0.11. By the way, in most of the countries that were formed in the place of the USSR, despite their most serious socio-economic problems, the relative mortality from hunger remains at surprisingly low levels: Belarus - 0.12; Armenia - 0.04; Moldova - 0.02; Uzbekistan - 0.03; Kyrgyzstan - 0.15, etc. From the states in the post-Soviet space, Kazakhstan has the highest level - 0.35.

But this data reflects the situation that was in the world four years ago. A sharp increase in the number of hungry people in the world should inevitably lead to an increase in the mortality rates from hunger in the world and in individual countries. To date, there are only some fragmentary estimates for the past and current year.

For example, the international non-governmental organisation Oxfam last month published a report "The hunger virus multiplies: deadly recipe of conflict, Covid-19 and climate accelerate world hunger".

The document says that every minute 11 people die from hunger and malnutrition. This is more than the death rate from COVID-19, which is about 7 people per minute. The conclusion is obvious: the emphasis of WHO and various departments is wrongly shifted from hunger as the main threat to the virus.

On the blog "Mercy Corps", an article about hunger provides the following data: every year 9 million people die from hunger and malnutrition in the world (estimate for 2017). This is more than from malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS combined. One child dies of hunger every ten seconds. Overall, hunger kills 3.1 million children every year. Approximately half of all deaths of children under the age of 5 are the result of hunger.

At the beginning of October last year, David Beasley, the head of the UNWFP, said that since the beginning of 2020, 7 million people have died of hunger in the world. Probably, according to the results of the entire last year, the death rate from hunger amounted to 9-10 million.

The website "The World Counts" has a counter of people who died of hunger in the world. As of mid-August, it showed that since the beginning of the year, the number of deaths from hunger in the world amounted to 5.62 million. At this point, the number of deaths from coronavirus in the world since the beginning of the year, according to official data, amounted to 2.53 million. If we compare the two figures, we come to the conclusion that the death rate from hunger this year in mid-August was 2.22 times higher than the death rate from the "pandemic".

David Beasley (the head of the UNWFP), who has been mentioned more than once, has repeatedly stated that only about $5 billion should be found to save people who are starving around the world. Unfortunately, the question of such assistance is not raised in the practical plane at the summits and in international financial organisations. They are concerned about something else: they need to find $100 billion to help developing countries with universal vaccination.