Examples Of Food Security Survey Questions: Fill & Download for Free

At this time, 61% of all home foreclosures in the US are the result of medical expenses. That alone is a preemptively good reason for universal healthcare. But here’s more detail on this:I recently ran into a young fool on Facebook lately who wanted proof when I said that we'd save $150B/year by having everyone in this country covered with basic health care. He accused me of playing a shell game with my figures when I mentioned this with only the comment that I could post supporting detail if anyone wanted. Well, he's young and a child of privilege and probably doesn't know anyone yet who needs health care and can't afford it; moreover, I think he actually believes what he hears on Faux News.I wrote the following over a lunch hour. Young Master Richard Cranium didn't believe that I'd done a good job of documenting all of this, saying that I should provide him with hard links to all of my info. So sorry, a lot of this requires you to get data from a variety of places and assemble it but it isn't rocket surgery. I did point him to Barbara Ehrenreich's classic and well-documented book, "Nickeled and Dimed." Alas, I haven't yet heard back from said young fool, but I don't expect to.The people who want to scotch any kind of universal health care are just posting all kinds of toxins about how much health care reform will cost without once mentioning how we can save a lot of money in the process.I believe in health care for everyone. I always have and, being married to someone who was a WA State judge for the Board of Industrial Insurance Appeals for years and years and learning just how your life can change forever through no fault of your own in seconds, I believe in it even harder now. I've heard stories, with the names and identifying marks rubbed off, of people who were happy, healthy, and functional, who had a tree fall on them or got kicked in the forehead and have permanently doubled vision, or were in a car accident or had a pipe blow up and ~poof!~ their lives were mangled forever after. Accidents happen.So here's how you save lots and lots of money by having general basic health care. I'm going to focus on disability claims through the SSA, because it's a single, specific venue out of many that's easy to identify. (BTW, I whipped all of this up in a single lunch hour. Most of the info can be had through the Social Security Administration’s website.)There were about 762,541 awards for SSA disability this past year. Half of these simply wouldn't be there if they'd gotten basic preventive health care when it would've done some good. (How do I know that? I hang out with a lot of lawyers who deal with SSA disability claims. Moreover, it's public information that can be obtained by digging around on Fed'l websites.) The average cost of servicing a disability claim is $750,000/claim over the life of the claim.For the people who didn’t need to be there, the ones who could’ve used medical care up front before their conditions got to the level of a disability, this works out to an annual (unnecessary) encumbrance of about $285B. Now, add to that the add'l costs of food, Section 8 housing, ER services, etc. This adds maybe another, oh, $95B and change to this. $380B.Now add the cost of the lost taxes, because if you're on disability, you are not earning money that gets paid to the IRS and state. Figure maybe $2B for that. Also be sure to add to this another $4B or so to represent the taxes that are paid by OTHER people on the money that these newly disabled people would have earned and pumped back into their local economy paying rent, buying food, gas, clothes, houses, school supplies, movies, and so on. The health of an economy is the function of how many times you can get the money to change hands, after all, and assuming these people would earn $30K/year on average if they could work, ($14/hour), the 70% of their money that's not going to taxes and FICA would otherwise be going to other people. That brings us up to $394B.Add in the annual costs of ER visits and local health clinic visits for the people ALREADY on disability--more money that's already being paid but that's not being accounted for. At maybe $500/month/person (ER visits, though probably not monthly, aren't cheap and the cost gets borne by the hospital), that comes to around $50B/year right there. Okay, we're up to $444B/year at this point that's already being spent because we don't have a national health care policy other than "Don't get sick."What about local services? I'm talking about private assistance through local organizations, churches, and so on. Again, takes longer to gather this data, but that's easily good for another $13B/year to people who wouldn't be in this boat if they weren't disabled and they wouldn't be disabled if they'd gotten basic health care when it was just an infected splinter and not a gangrenous leg. $457B.Another "small" cost is the cost for disability hearings, which runs $1000/hearing, or only $400M/year, but another, easier way to look at it is this: SSA Administrative Law Judges cost around $150,000 a year. If you don't have but half the people applying, you don't need but half the judges (1000 judges at $165,000/year) plus the support staff of senior attorneys, case writers, case pullers, and all the rest. Figure you'll save a cool $1B/year in salaries here, which brings us to $458B/year. (Note: This will also put a bunch of SSA disability lawyers out of business, too, but, hell, you didn't care about the income stream for lawyers whose job it is representing disability patients anyway, didja?)All of this is pretty easy to justify in hard numbers. You can find out a lot of this directly through the SSA website. If need be, you can do a FOIA request, but generally, this stuff is publicly available on Federal websites. You also can check on amortized costs of food stamps, Section 8 housing, and how much emergency medical care costs that is written off by the hospitals or reimbursed by the state or Federal gov'ts.Okay, My goal had been to show $150B of savings. So far, I'm just talking about people who have applied for disability through Social Security and I've gotten to $458B/year. That's a mighty specific, narrow venue for money we spend already. I ran out of time on my lunch hour to describe the specifics for other venues, but the information is easily available; it'll just take a few hours of your time to track it down if you need the specifics. But let me pose the following as exercises for the reader:How many people don't apply for disability through the SSA because they're applying for benefits through a different venue, such as Worker's Comp, which is a much more populated venue?How many people don't apply at all who are nevertheless disabled? According to the U.S. Census Bureau's March 2008 Current Population Survey (CPS), more than 19 million working—age Americans-10.9 percent of people ages 21 to 64—have a work disability.There's a powerful disincentive to reporting improvements in your medical condition because you lose your health benefits. How many people are continuing to receive disability benefits because there's a good reason to not report improvement?How many people are not fully disabled and don't meet the listing but are definitely working far below potential capacity, earning less money, paying fewer taxes, and--very frequently--having degrading physical health as a result?How many people are getting welfare/other public assistance who don't qualify for SSA disability?How many people aren't disabled but are simply uninsured and who soak up ER and medical benefits in a much more costly venue (again, cf. Barbara Ehrenreich's “Nickeled and Dimed” for examples)?How many people are getting other kinds of disability such as Worker’s Comp? We may reasonably assume that roughly half of these people also would not be there with medical care and the Worker’s Comp disability is a much bigger pool of people.I've shown in a very documentable way that in just one visible venue--Social Security disability applicants--we are already encumbering or spending $458B every year. Had I more time to write about this, I could very easily have demonstrated some of the many additional costs, but I've got to get back to work. But even if you're dealing with just these numbers here, that's $458B that I don't believe anyone is talking about when they're claiming how much all of this will cost in "new" dollars. And that is one of the biggest things I object to about these supposed think tanks that are talking about the costs: they omit the liabilities already engendered. Certainly the Republicans are not. I also believe the Congressional Budget Office is not talking about this kind of savings; they're only focused on the hard costs, which is not the complete picture. It's not in their scope to make this kind of comparison, though, so it's not like blame should attach to them as it does to the Republican naysayers.However, there are some additional non-dollar costs that I'd like to posit for consideration as well:How many deaths are acceptable to you? People who aren't getting medical care die more frequently and younger than people who don't. By the thousands. The published figures some years ago were showing some 44,000 add'l deaths a year for the uninsured population. (Sorry, I’m not looking it up to find out if this number is still exact.)How much damage is there to the communitas, the sense of self and community, by adding ~375,000 people to the non-working poor? Non-working poor, people on the dole with no way off it, are sand in the social gears. They don't want to be there anymore than anyone else, but it's not like there are a lot of choices. 375,000 disability applicants/year is 60% of the population of Seattle, WA, with nobody who works.Bonus question for Christians: Isn't it a little bald and unchristian to say that you are willing to throw people aside like used condoms just because they don't have enough money to afford private health insurance? Jesus didn't demand a premium, a co-pay, and an annual deductible for healing the sick.There's a truly enormous amount of money we're already spending on health care; I just have run out of time to write about it right now. But if your argument about health care is that we really can't afford it, I think I've done a good job of demonstrating that we can afford this, easily.Oh, and if your argument is all about how this promotes "socialism" (as if anyone outside of 1957 actually gave a crap), I'm pleased that you aren't going to be collecting on your Social Security, or using Medicare/Medicaid, public schools, student loans for college, public roads and utilities, or any of the banks or auto manufacturers that ever got bailed out by the Republicans in 2008 as well. I mean, day-umn, that's really putting your money where your mouth is! Nice to see you have the courage of your convictions.BTW, I found a resource or two for the non-believers and jackasses. In a recent edition of the Annual SSI report, the projections for SSI recipients in 2032 was about 9.5M people. If half of those are there only because of the need for health care early on, then that's 4.75M people who could be productive, functional members of society instead of on the dole. You do the math for how much that'd cost the country.(Note: I’ve tried to make all this accurate, but I did things in a rush and I freely admit I might’ve made a mistake in my calculations. I've got a spreadsheet for the really detailed numbers, but if the best argument someone can come up with to refute this is to claim that it should be $350B instead of $380B, they've lost already.)

How would the government fund "Medicare for all"?Yes, it would be easy to fund. Here’s something I wrote some years ago on my personal blog about this very topic. Please note that this doesn’t cover the fact that any number of other countries manage to do this for less money than we spend now in the US.**Some hard numbers on health care reform you haven't heard before**I ran into a young fool on Facebook lately who wanted proof that we'd save $150B/year by having everyone in this country covered with basic health care. He accused me of playing a shell game with my figures when I mentioned this with only the comment that I could post supporting detail if anyone wanted. Well, he's young and a child of privilege and probably doesn't know anyone yet who needs health care and can't afford it; moreover, I think he actually believes what he hears on Faux News.I wrote the following over a lunch hour. Young Master Richard Cranium didn't believe that I'd done a good job of documenting all of this, saying that I should provide him with hard links to all of my info. So sorry, a lot of this requires you to get data from a variety of places and assemble it but it isn't rocket surgery. I did point him to Barbara Ehrenreich's classic and well-documented book, "Nickeled and Dimed." Alas, I haven't yet heard back from said young fool, but I don't expect to. He sounded like a dittohead. He's big on the Teabaggers, so I encourage him to go teabag as much as he likes.What makes this post worth reading is that I don't know that anyone has actually talked much about this in a public forum yet. Certainly the people who want to scotch any kind of health care reform are not telling you about this; they're just posting all kinds of toxins about how much health care reform will cost without once mentioning how we can save a lot of money in the process.I believe in health care for everyone. I always have and, being married to The Babe (who was a WA State judge for the Board of Industrial Insurance Appeals for years and years) and learning just how your life can change forever through no fault of your own in seconds, I believe in it even harder now. I've heard stories, with the names and identifying marks rubbed off, of people who were happy, healthy, and functional, who had a tree fall on them or got kicked in the forehead and have permanently doubled vision, or were in a car accident or had a pipe blow up and ~poof!~ their lives were mangled forever after. Accidents happen.So here's how you save lots and lots of money by having general basic health care. I'm going to focus on disability claims through the SSA, because it's a single, specific venue out of many that's easy to identify. (BTW, I whipped all of this up in a single lunch hour. Most of the info can be had through the www.ssa.gov website.)There were about 250,000 disability claimants this past year. Half of these simply wouldn't be there if they'd gotten basic preventive health care when it would've done some good. (How do I know that? I hang out with a lot of lawyers who deal with SSA disability claims. Moreover, it's public information that can be obtained by digging around on Fed'l websites.) The average cost of servicing a disability claim is $750,000/claim over the life of the claim.Assuming that all of these are approved for benefits, that's an annual encumbrance of $93.75B. But let's assume it's 'only' $50B worth that are approved to pay out $800/month max in bennies. Now, add to that the add'l costs of food, Section 8 housing, ER services, etc. This adds maybe another, oh, $17B and change to this. $67B. (Yeah, I've got a spreadsheet for the really detailed numbers, but if the best argument someone can come up with is claim that it should be $15B instead of $17B, they've lost already.)Now add the cost of the lost taxes, because if you're on disability, you are not earning money that gets paid to the IRS and state. Figure maybe $.75B for that. Also be sure to add to this another $1.5B or so to represent the taxes that are paid by OTHER people on the money that these newly disabled people would have earned and pumped back into their local economy paying rent, buying food, gas, clothes, houses, school supplies, movies, and so on. The health of an economy is the function of how many times you can get the money to change hands, after all, and assuming these people would earn $30K/year on average if they could work, ($14/hour), the 70% of their money that's not going to taxes and FICA would otherwise be going to other people. That's about $69B.Add in the annual costs of ER visits and local health clinic visits for the people ALREADY on disability--more money that's already being paid but that's not being accounted for. At maybe $500/month/person (ER visits, though probably not monthly, aren't cheap and the cost gets borne by the hospital), that comes to around $25B/year right there. Okay, we're up to $94B/year at this point that's already being spent because we don't have a national health care policy other than "Don't get sick."What about local services? I'm talking about private assistance through local organizations, churches, and so on. Again, takes longer to gather this data, but that's easily good for another $5B/year to people who wouldn't be in this boat if they weren't disabled and they wouldn't be disabled if they'd gotten basic health care when it was just an infected splinter and not a gangrenous leg. $99B.Another "small" cost is the cost for disability hearings, which runs $800/hearing, or only $100M/year, but another, easier way to look at it is this: SSA Administrative Law Judges cost around $150,000 a year. If you don't have but half the people applying, you don't need but half the judges (1000 judges at $150,000/year) plus the support staff of senior attorneys, case writers, case pullers, and all the rest. Figure you'll save a cool billion/year in salaries here, which brings us to the nice round figure of $100B/year. (Note: This will also put a bunch of SSA disability lawyers out of business, too, but, hell, you didn't care about the income stream for lawyers whose job it is representing disability patients anyway, didja?)All of this is pretty easy to justify in hard numbers. You can find out a lot of this directly through the SSA website. If need be, you can do a FOIA request, but generally, this stuff is publicly available on Federal websites. You also can check on amortized costs of food stamps, Section 8 housing, and how much emergency medical care costs that is written off by the hospitals or reimbursed by the state or Federal gov'ts.Okay, My goal had been to show $150B of savings. So far, I'm just talking about people who have applied for disability through Social Security and I've gotten to $100B/year. That's a mighty specific, narrow venue for money we spend already. I ran out of time on my lunch hour to describe the specifics for other venues, but the information is easily available; it'll just take a few hours of your time to track it down if you need the specifics. But let me pose the following as exercises for the reader:How many people don't apply for disability through the SSA because they're applying for benefits through a different venue, such as Worker's Comp, which is a much more populated venue?How many people don't apply at all who are nevertheless disabled? According to the U.S. Census Bureau's March 2008 Current Population Survey (CPS), more than 19 million working—age Americans-10.9 percent of people ages 21 to 64—have a work disability. (More information can be found here.)There's a powerful disincentive to reporting improvements in your medical condition because you lose your health benefits. How many people are continuing to receive disability benefits because there's a good reason to not report improvement?How many people are not fully disabled and don't meet the listing but are definitely working far below potential capacity, earning less money, paying fewer taxes, and--very frequently--having degrading physical health as a result?How many people are getting welfare/other public assistance who don't qualify for SSA disability?How many people aren't disabled but are simply uninsured and who soak up ER and medical benefits in a much more costly venue (cf. Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickeled and Dimed" for examples)?I've shown in a very documentable way that in just one visible venue--Social Security disability applicants--we are already encumbering or spending $100B every year. Had I more time to write about this, I could very easily have demonstrated some of the many additional costs, but I've got to get back to work. But even if you're dealing with just these numbers here, that's $100B that I don't believe anyone is talking about when they're claiming how much all of this will cost in "new" dollars. And that is one of the biggest things I object to about these supposed think tanks that are talking about the costs: they omit the liabilities already engendered. Certainly the Republicans are not. I also believe the Congressional Budget Office is not talking about this kind of savings; they're only focused on the hard costs, which is not the complete picture. It's not in their scope to make this kind of comparison, though, so it's not like blame should attach to them as it does to the Republican naysayers.However, there are some additional non-dollar costs that I'd like to posit for consideration as well:How many deaths are acceptable to you? People who aren't getting medical care die more frequently and younger than people who don't. By the thousands. (For this, start with HHS for numbers.) The published figures show some 44,000 add'l deaths a year for the uninsured population.How much damage is there to the communitas, the sense of self and community, by adding 125,000 people to the non-working poor? Non-working poor, people on the dole with no way off it, are sand in the social gears. They don't want to be there anymore than anyone else, but it's not like there are a lot of choices. 125,000 disability applicants/year is a town about the size of Springfield, OR with nobody who works.Bonus question for Christians: Isn't it a little bald and unchristian to say that you are willing to throw people aside like used condoms just because they don't have enough money to afford private health insurance? Jesus didn't demand a premium, a co-pay, and an annual deductible for healing the sick.There's a truly enormous amount of money we're already spending on health care; I just have run out of time to write about it right now. But if your argument about health care is that we really can't afford it, I think I've done a good job of demonstrating that we can afford this, easily. For example, Gov. Rick Perry--aka "Dick"--was claiming that the ACA would cost Texas $4B/year, and was, therefore, a bad idea. Given that Texas has about 1/12th of the US population, that's $8.5B just of that $100B that I was describing. So if he got on board with that, he'd be roughly $4.5B/year to the good just on that portion alone. For a Republican, he sure don't seem to know shit about saving money.Oh, and if your argument is all about how this promotes "socialism" (as if anyone outside of 1957 actually gave a crap), I'm pleased that you aren't going to be collecting on your Social Security, or using Medicare/Medicaid, public schools, student loans for college, public roads and utilities, or any of the banks or auto manufacturers that ever got bailed out by the Republicans in 2008 as well.Day-umn, boy, that's really putting your money where your mouth is! Nice to see you have the courage of your convictions.Addendum: I found a resource or two for the non-believers. The 2008 Annual SSI Report covers a considerable amount of ground. Of note should be the projections for SSI recipients in 2032, about 9.5M people. If half of those are there only because of the need for health care early on, then that's 4.75M people who could be productive, functional members of society instead of on the dole. You do the math for how much that'd cost the country.There's also a primer on Social Security disability insurance from the AARP.Addendum, March 28, 2010: Please see this follow-up post about Nixon's plan for universal health care.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-malthus-predicted-1798-food-shortages/#:~:text=In%201798%20Thomas%20Robert%20Malthus,living%20standards%20back%20toward%20subsistence.“Some economists have gone so far as to argue that high and rising populations have been a major cause of increased living standards, rather than an impediment. In that interpretation, the eightfold increase in population since 1798 has also raised the number of geniuses in similar proportion, and it is genius above all that propels global human advance. A large human population, so it is argued, is just what is needed to propel progress.Yet the Malthusian specter is not truly banished—indeed far from it. Our increase in know-how has not only been about getting more outputs for the same inputs, but also about our ability to mine the Earth for more inputs. The first Industrial Revolution began with the use of fossil fuel, specifically coal, through Watt’s steam engine. Humanity harnessed geological deposits of ancient solar energy, stored as coal, oil, and gas, to do our modern bidding. We learned to dig deeper for minerals, fish the oceans with larger nets, divert rivers with greater dams and canals, appropriate more habitats of other species and cut down forests with more powerful land-clearing equipment. In countless ways, we have not gotten more for less but rather more for more, as we’ve converted rich stores of natural capital into high flows of current consumption. Much of what we call “income,” in the true sense of adding value from economic activity, is actually depletion instead, or the running down of natural capital.And although family planning and contraception have indeed secured a low fertility rate in most parts of the world, the overall fertility rate remains at 2.6, far above replacement. Sub-Saharan Africa, the poorest region of the world, still has a total fertility rate of 5.1 children per woman, and the global population continues to rise by about 79 million per year, with much of the increase in the world’s poorest places. According to the medium-fertility forecast of the United Nations Population Division we are on course for 9.2 billion people by mid-century.”“If we indeed run out of inexpensive oil and fall short of food, deplete our fossil groundwater and destroy remaining rainforests, and gut the oceans and fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases that tip the earth’s climate into a runaway hothouse with rising ocean levels, we might yet confirm the Malthusian curse. Yet none of this is inevitable The idea that improved know-how and voluntary fertility reduction can sustain a high, indeed rising, level of incomes for the world remains correct, but only if future technology enables us to economize on natural capital rather than finding ever more clever ways to deplete it more cheaply and rapidly.In the coming decades we will have to convert to solar power and safe nuclear power, both of which offer essentially unbounded energy supplies (compared with current energy use) if harnessed properly and with improved technologies and social controls. Know-how will have to be applied to long-mileage automobiles, water-efficient farming, and green buildings that cut down sharply on energy use. We will need to re-think modern diets and urban design to achieve healthier lifestyles that also cut down on energy-intensive consumption patterns. And we will have to help Africa and other regions to speed the demographic transition to replacement fertility levels, in order to stabilize the global population at around 8 billion.There is nothing in such a sustainable scenario that violates the Earth’s resource constraints or energy availability. Yet we are definitely not yet on such a sustainable trajectory, and our current market signals do not lead us to such a path. We will need new policies to push markets in a sustainable manner (for example, taxes on carbon to reduce greenhouse gas emissions) and to promote technological advances in resource saving rather than resource mining. We will need a new politics to recognize the importance of a sustainable growth strategy and global cooperation to achieve it.Have we beaten Malthus? After two centuries, we still do not really know.”Regardless of the truth of this analysis, we are, in 2021, experiencing a long predicted worldwide pandemic that arose out of human ignorance and greed, that was decades in the making. Note this amazingly accurate forecast back in 2003.Awake! magazine of Dec. 2005 had this to say."The medical journal Vaccine reported in 2003: “It has been 35 years since the last influenza pandemic, and the longest interval between pandemics recorded with certainty is 39 years.” The article continued: “The pandemic virus may emerge in China or a nearby country and could include surface antigens or virulence factors derived from animal influenza viruses.”The Vaccine article predicted concerning the virus: “It will spread rapidly throughout the world. Several waves of infection will occur. Morbidity will be extensive in all age groups, and there will be widespread disruption of social and economic activity in all countries. Excess mortality will be evident in most if not all age groups. It is unlikely that health care systems in even the most economically developed countries will be able to adequately cope with the demand for healthcare services."Sounds right, doesn’t it?What other issues has it wrought?Health systems are collapsing even in the wealthier countries.“2020 was a devastating year for global health. A previously unknown virus raced around the world, rapidly emerging as one of its top killers, laying bare the inadequacies of health systems. Today, health services in all regions are struggling to both tackle COVID-19, and provide people with vital care.In another blow, the pandemic threatens to set back hard-won global health progress achieved over the past two decades - in fighting infectious diseases, for example, and improving maternal and child health.”10 global health issues to track in 2021 - WorldEnglish News and Press Release on World about Health, Protection and Human Rights and Epidemic; published on 24 Dec 2020 by WHOhttps://reliefweb.int/report/world/10-global-health-issues-track-2021“Much as we may want to consign 2020 to the dustbin of history, it taught us some vital lessons and it sets the stage for the year ahead. It showed us that a global pandemic is not just a health crisis, but also an economic crisis, an education crisis, an inequality crisis, and so much more. We saw rising food insecurity, growing polarization, and surging mistrust of public institutions and leaders, not to mention a devastating and disproportionate toll on women, girls, and other marginalized communities.”Five Global Issues to Watch in 2021 | unfoundation.org2020 showed us that a global pandemic is not just a health crisis, but also an economic crisis, an education crisis, an inequality crisis, and so much more.https://unfoundation.org/blog/post/five-global-issues-to-watch-in-2021/“According to a United Nations World Food Program (WFP) report, COVID-19 might have left up to 265 million people with acute food shortages in 2020. The combined effect of the pandemic as well as the emerging global recession "could, without large-scale coordinated action, disrupt the functioning of food systems," which would "result in consequences for health and nutrition of a severity and scale unseen for more than half a century," states another UN report.In the United States, "food insecurity has doubled overall, and tripled among households with children" due to the pandemic, states a June 2020 report by the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) at Northwestern University, which relied on data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey. In a recent interview with CBS News, IPR Director Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach warned that these statistics would likely "continue to hold," with the numbers indicating particularly dramatic rises in food insecurity among Black and Latinx families. Indeed, families of color are being disproportionately impacted. According to an analysis of new Census data by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), 22 percent of Black and 21 percent of Latinx respondents reported not having enough to eat, compared to just 9 percent of white people.Globally, the effects of COVID-19 on food security are equally, if not more, severe. According to a CBS News report, WFP Director David Beasley told the UN Security Council in April 2020 that the world is on "the brink of a hunger pandemic." He added, "In a worst-case scenario, we could be looking at famine in about three dozen countries, and in fact, in 10 of these countries we already have more than one million people per country who are on the verge of starvation.""The number of chronically hungry people increased by an estimated 130 million last year, to more than 800 million — about eight times the total number of COVID-19 cases to date," wrote Mark Lowcock, the under-secretary-general and emergency relief coordinator at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), and Axel van Trotsenburg, managing director of operations at the World Bank. "Countries affected by conflict and climate change are particularly vulnerable to food insecurity. Empty stomachs can stunt whole generations.The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) warns that climate change "is likely to diminish continued progress on global food security through production disruptions that lead to local availability limitations and price increases, interrupted transport conduits, and diminished food safety." The same might be said about the pandemic, which has made it abundantly clear: climate resilience, food security and global health are closely intertwined.In terms of food security, another major concern is the pandemic-related school closures that have occurred across the globe, with UNICEF reporting that more than 1.6 billion children and young people have been affected. Schools provide a food lifeline for children; for so many, that is where they get their only nutritious meal of the day. In January, the UNICEF Office of Research — Innocenti, and WFP released a new report that found that more than 39 billion in-school meals have been missed worldwide since the pandemic began, with 370 million children worldwide having missed 40 percent of in-school meals.In early 2020, when COVID-19 was still a looming specter rather than the deadly virus we're more familiar with today, the threat of food insecurity was a practical problem. Scenes of shoppers descending on aisles to stock up on supplies were a common sight. As CNN reported in March 2020, supermarkets around the world rationed food and other products such as toilet paper and cleaning supplies, in an effort to curb stockpiling.In Vermont, for instance, a steady increase in food insecurity since the start of the pandemic has correlated to employment levels, according to a survey conducted by the University of Vermont between March and April 2020. Approximately 45 percent of respondents "had lost their jobs, been furloughed or had their hours reduced during the pandemic," and a further two-thirds of survey participants who recorded scarcity of food in their households "had experienced job losses or work disruptions since the outbreak of the pandemic," according to the survey. Vermont is just one example; the impact has been felt across the U.S. During the week before Thanksgiving in 2020, the Guardian reported that 5.6 million U.S. households "struggled to put enough food on the table," while referring to the analysis of the Census data by CBPP.As the pandemic continues to upend lives across the world, it has impacted the entire food supply chain. With factory and supermarket workers being highly susceptible to COVID-19, there's been a concomitant decline in food production and a rise in prices. As Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group (EWG), reported, farmers in the U.S. were already facing labor shortages prior to the pandemic, and with tightened immigration as well as the heightened risk and poor compensation associated with these jobs, "food processors and farm labor contractors may struggle to find other workers willing to risk their lives to work in meat plants, packing sheds or produce fields."The pandemic has exposed the weakness of the industrialized global food system, which depends on long, complex transportation chains and cross-border travel. "[T]he monstrous and unsustainable food industry known as Big Ag... relies on the horrendous treatment of laborers, a wasteful allocation of resources, worldwide environmental devastation — and in a pinch, can quickly devolve into near-collapse of the entire system, as evidenced by the delays, shortages and pressure during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the deepening hunger crisis in America," April M. Short, a fellow at the Independent Media Institute, recently wrote in Salon. "Among the many necessary systemic changes 2020 has illuminated is the need to majorly restructure the way we cultivate and access food in our communities."It didn't take the pandemic to reveal the inefficiency and injustice of our food system: Globally, a third of all food is wasted, while nearly 690 million people were undernourished in 2019 — almost 60 million more people than in 2014. But the pandemic has underscored the matter: According to OCHA, "the number of acutely food insecure people could increase to 270 million due to COVID-19, representing an 82 percent increase compared to the number of acutely food insecure people pre-COVID-19."And the disruption of transportation has shown that the long distances it normally takes for food to get from one place to another can be a serious liability during a crisis. "[F]ood banks are under tremendous pressure to meet the skyrocketing demand," said a CNN article quoting from a letter Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, Feeding America CEO, and Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, wrote to then-Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue in April 2020. "At the same time, however, we are seeing literally tons of agricultural goods being discarded because of the shutdown of so much of the economy."Consumer demand has shifted from eating out at restaurants and food services away from home, and food supply chain operations have had to be retooled. And that impact has been felt within the transportation sector. Forbes reported that Andrew Novakovic, an agricultural economist at Cornell University, "points to a number of weak spots in the food transportation system that could be aggravated by the increased demand for food." A shortage of truck drivers is one potential weak spot, says Novakovic. Although he concedes there is debate on this matter, Novakovic maintains that "[t]rucking companies are finding it much harder to recruit [those] long haul drivers." China, which was the first country to be hit by the virus, offers insight into the prolonged impact of the pandemic on transportation and food systems. The lockdown in the Hubei province of China, which is home to 66 million people, led to a shortage in delivery of animal feed as well as refrigerated containers full of imported vegetables, fruit and frozen meat in February 2020, according to an article in The Conversation.In addition to shifting consumer demand, the pandemic has also made us take a closer look at where our food comes from and how it impacts not only the lives of food workers but also the lives of animals trapped in the food system. According to a new public opinion survey conducted by Lake Research Partners and commissioned by the animal rights group American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, "[t]he vast majority (89 percent) of Americans are concerned about industrial animal agriculture, citing animal welfare, worker safety or public health risks as a concern." The survey also found that "85 percent of farmers and their families support a complete ban on new industrial animal agriculture facilities — almost twice the level of support expressed by the general public." This finding shows key support for the Farm System Reform Act, legislation that was introduced in 2019 by Democratic Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey that, among other reforms, seeks to put a moratorium on new or expanding factory farms.Food insecurity has long been a pressing issue, particularly for developing countries. However, as Mir Ashrafun Nahar, a research associate at the South Asian Network on Economic Modeling, explained in a Financial Express article, "the COVID-19 pandemic has made it more acute." In response, Nahar argues for a policy-based approach that includes "subsidy based transportation systems for agriculture" to support supply chains, as well as policies aimed at cutting down on agricultural production costs in order to help farmers recover from the effects of the pandemic.The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an intergovernmental economic group with 37 member countries, said that the pandemic "has laid bare pre-existing gaps in social protection systems" in a report published in June 2020. "While the impacts of COVID-19 are still unfolding, experience so far shows the importance of an open and predictable international trade environment to ensure food can move to where it is needed," the OECD report states. "The biggest risk for food security is not with food availability but with consumers' access to food: safety nets are essential to avoid an increase in hunger and food insecurity."Another problem is the lack of media coverage about the food insecurity being witnessed around the world, particularly during the COVID-19 era. As the Economist recently pointed out, journalists in 2020 "wrote more than 50,000 articles about the canceled Eurovision song contest, but only around 2,000 about drought and hunger in Zambia."For meaningful reform to the food system to occur, change is going to have to happen at every level: from federal, state and local governments, to Big Ag, small farmers and everyday consumers. With the future looking ever more uncertain due to the climate crisis — one of President Biden's top priorities — adapting to new ways of producing and transporting food will be key to our survival.https://www.ecowatch.com/urban-farming-coronavirus-pandemic-2647433678.htmlThe pandemic has exposed the simmering underbelly of racial prejudice and anarchy leading to increasing violence around the world as people openly rebel against all authority. Civil unrest has escalated and mindless armed violence and random mass killings are on the increase.This pandemic has yet only begun and won’t be the only one. Deniers are actively, even violently, undermining attempts to curb it’s progress and spreading it everywhere they go. Countries who thought they were making progress in containing it are seeing resurgences.The virus is mutating faster than science can keep up with and new strains being discovered are proving to be not only more highly contageous but more resistant to vaccines and more deadly.Two weeks ago, this bulletin from the UK…“The contagious UK variant of Covid-19 has mutated again, in worrying genetic changes that may give the virus the ability to evade the immune system, according to scientists.Public Health England reported that tests on some samples detected genomes with the E484K mutation, which has already been seen in the highly transmissible South African and Brazilian variants.Calum Semple, a top scientist advising the UK government, told BBC radio that this "mutation of most concern" had developed spontaneously in the UK variant first detected in Kent in England's south.Health officials warned the UK variant has mutated again, and may now be able to evade the immune system.Sky's science correspondent Thomas Moore said the "worrying development" meant the virus had effectively "developed a superpower" that enabled it to not only infect cells, but also to evade the immune system.Research suggests the mutation may be more resistant to antibodies, although Moderna and Pfizer have claimed their vaccines are still effective.Early testing by Moderna found its vaccine could protect against the mutation, although the effects may not be as strong or last as long. AstraZeneca is due to announce results on its vaccine's effectiveness against the mutation this week.UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock on Tuesday said a further 11 cases of mutations of concern had been identified in Bristol and 32 in Liverpool, warning of "renewed challenges posed by new variants of the coronavirus".The final part of your question, re: leaving Earth, is a pipe dream.