Coronavirus and hunger: the bigger killer?
Die globalen Auswirkungen von Covid-19 könnten sich als tödlicher erweisen als das Virus selbst. Die Weltgemeinschaft muss jetzt handeln, um Leben zu retten.
ADVANCED AUDIO
Yet the worst is not inevitable. The food crisis is currently one of distribution and affordability . ... Developing countries cannot afford the support packages adopted elsewhere, and no single nation can solve supply issues. International solutions are required; UN organisations are uniquely placed to handle border closures, restrictions and transport disruption given their regional presences, contacts and diplomacy. … Persuading governments to allow essential ... workers to move within and between countries will be crucial.
… The G20 and International Monetary Fund agreements to suspend debt are a step forward, but insufficient; private creditors, too, must act. All this is a matter of common decency, but also of self-interest. … In several countries, the spectre of unrest is already emerging. Coronavirus is the latest and perhaps most immediate demonstration of what the climate crisis and wars in Syria and elsewhere should already have told us: that other people’s suffering will not be contained. It is our business, too.
© Guardian News & Media 2020
urn on ESPN,” my brother told the rest of our family in a text message. “They’ve got the world stoneskipping championships on.”
Now, this was my kind of sporting event! It was March, and the coronavirus pandemic had just forced the cessation of professional sports across America. It was too risky for fans to crowd into arenas and stadiums, or even for athletes to play these games together.
The sporting shutdown has been a crippling blow to a big part of the US economy, throwing thousands of people out of work. But it also became a major challenge for the TV networks that earn so much of their advertising revenue from broadcasting games — especially ESPN, the wildly popular channel devoted to sports 24 hours a day.
So, when basketball season ended prematurely, and baseball never started, ESPN turned instead to ... well, cup-stacking and axe-throwing championships. Professional arm-wrestling. Even a bratwurst-eating contest. And people actually watched these events!
Most of these games had been recorded months earlier, when more prestigious sports crowded out their chance of being on TV. But now, there was interest. My family traded text messages as we watched the stone-skipping championships — filmed on a picturesque lake near the Canadian border last summer — from our separate homes. My sister, an excellent stone-skipper, had plenty of thoughts. “I think I could beat a lot of these players,” she said.
ESPN also got millions of viewers to tune in to a ten-hour documentary about a basketball player who retired nearly 20 years ago. OK, it wasn’t just any player, but Michael Jordan, perhaps the best in history. The amount of time people spent talking about those long-ago games showed how much they missed sports.
If you’re a true sports fanatic, the effects of the coronavirus and lockdown on sports this summer probably left you deeply depressed. Some experts say it was akin to depression, or withdrawal from a drug. For many people, sports are the basis for their social connections, and a way to mark the passage of the seasons — as well as being a significant source of mental stimulation. In other words, they’re part of the glue that holds together their way of life.
I’m not much of a sports fan, but I am married to one. I never understood why my husband would watch reruns of sporting events from decades ago. Then, one night, he tuned in to a game from the 1977 World Series on ESPN. I was suddenly hit by a wave of nostalgia: I had watched this game as a child, as my father explained the rules of baseball to me. “I’ve never seen you so interested in a baseball game,” my husband marveled. Maybe it’s not too late for me to become a fan after all.