The Coronavirus Pandemic is Putting Immense Pressure on Food Banks
A daily Covid-19 update from Andy Slavitt, former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
Pulled from my daily COVID-19 updates on Twitter
Today let’s talk about food supply, hoarding, hunger, and food banks. There is plenty of food. Plenty. We need to make sure it gets to the right places. The amount of hunger in major cities is bad and growing. The outlook for May is uncertain.
A few things have happened since the outbreak:
- General panic buying of non-perishables
- Closing of many commercial food buyers (restaurants, schools, corporate cafeterias)
- Illness in labor, transportation, packing, warehousing
- Soaring demand at food banks
Food producers are producing many of the goods we’re missing in grocery stores and food banks, but can’t bring them to market because:
- Pallets, SKUS, barcoding sizes don’t fit
- Restaurant & commercial sizes are different
- Food producers can’t pay transport & labor
The result of all this seems to be that the food we’re growing for the commercial market isn’t being repurposed for grocery stores or food banks. What happens? It’s being mulched. Half the dairy and produce apparently is being put back in the ground. Cows are being slaughtered.
Meanwhile, there is excessive buying of canned foods, boxed foods and other non-perishables. And milk and eggs are out in many stores — because they are in the wrong sizes to be sold in stores. That needs to change.
What I learned is more confirmation that when the American machine is running smoothly, “just in time” inventories and our bar code systems keep things cheap, but there are precious few months of slack in the system if something goes haywire.
So I called a few food banks to figure out how things are impacting them. What I heard shocked me. It was a lot like the shortage economy impacting PPE. Turns out food banks get food in a 2/day auction. And the cost of many of the items they are bidding on is increasing rapidly as diminished supply from hoarding and wasted production cause food banks to bid against one another. Non-perishables are in short supply.
I talked to an executive at a major food company and he verified that what I’ve heard makes sense. I’m sure there are plenty of people who understand the mechanics better than me, and if so, I welcome their additions or comments.
So food banks need food or $ to buy food. Most told me they were pretty well stocked through April but with a lot more perishables. Beto O'Rourke told me that Texas hasn’t been able to get rice or beans. He’s been raising money and finding volunteers for food banks. (I also could tell he wouldn’t mind finding some rice and beans himself.)
Food banks sounded worried about what would happen come May when supplies are lower. If perhaps you overbought non-perishables or aren’t worried about going hungry, a food bank donation would probably be hugely welcomed. The ones I talked to said there are hours and hours of lines.
Once you find a food bank near you, here is what is recommended:
If you didn’t see this line of cars to get food at a food bank in Pittsburgh, it may sear in your memory like it did mine.
I was so bothered by the food waste and the fact that growers were putting food back into the ground that I called the Administration to see if I could understand what could be done. Basically, the White House and Economists are aware of the potential and the current threat. I proposed that the Federal government buy and distribute from the growers, make a market, and reduce the shortages. I’m sure there are other ideas. Let me know.
(Also, get Beto his beans.)
On the testing front, I got what I felt was good news today. We did 1 million tests this week, a far cry from what we need. Yesterday I thought we could get to 1.5 million in the next few weeks. Now I wouldn’t be surprised if we get to 2 million. My belief is we should be producing 10 million tests/week. This is far higher than anyone else’s projection. But it’s achievable if we pull out all the stops.
We have two announced instant tests — Roche & Sephiod. And there will be a third announced soon. All new capacity.
To get to the level of production we want, we would be eating into other high volume tests that we use and need. For example, test that detect things like cancers or are used in developing countries for other needs. So we need to weigh these as public tradeoffs, not backdoor moves.
Let me go up to 30,000 feet. If we can reduce community case loads for a very small amount and have R0 < 1 (socially isolating like a boss), then we would be in a position to test samples of healthy people and everyone with a symptom plus all front line workers regularly.
If you find a positive test, you need to be able to see who you’ve come in contact with. Common way is to have public health workers to do two days worth of outreach to everyone you’ve been in contact with. And because they could be asymptomatic, everyone those people have been in contact with. That’s super inefficient. But you need to do this so you can isolate people temporarily to prevent a wide outbreak.
There is another way: Technology. Like South Korea did, use your phone to help you see who you were in contact with. This has some tradeoffs. And this is how at least some people think of it.
With testing and contact tracing, at that point, we would theoretically be able to contain most of the outbreaks as they pop up. All of this goes into my final point: What will Trump decide?
Over the course of the last week I’ve been picking up points here and there about Trump, but it hasn’t been the most salient issue to write about. The last three days I have been working to understand the death toll model, nursing homes and other vulnerable areas, and food. Sharing updates on testing as needed. I need to update on PPE winch I will Monday. (Gowns are the new thing.)
All of this will lead to big topics for next week — COVID4 bill and what Trump and governors will do come end of the month with regard to opening businesses and social distance messaging.
In the meantime we are approaching 9/11 death tolls on a daily basis. And we have had no chance to mourn these losses and the other losses in our lives. Peak or no peak, the toll in lives, hunger, job loss, and fear have been real. We must tend to each other.
