Hunger remains a growing issue in pandemic-ravaged America, with the number of people saying they sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat within the past week growing by 10 percent since the spring, said the Washington Post. The number in March was 18 million; as of the end of August, it was 22.3 million. If we assume a population of 328 million, this means 6.8 percent of the country lacks consistent access to food.

As businesses continue shutting down, and emergency aid runs out, with little chance of the government approving another round anytime soon, this number is likely to get higher. In fact, the organization Feeding America, which advocate for food banks, estimates that Americans collectively may wind up missing between 6 billion to 8 billion meals over the next 12 months, given current trends. In order to meet people's needs in this time of tumult, the organization estimates that food banks across the country will need 17 billion  pounds among them, triple the amount they distributed last year. Yet these same food banks, said the Post, are challenged both by fewer donations and fewer volunteers.

The Post noted that certain areas of the country have even more hunger than this grim national average. Eastern Massachusetts, for example, has seen food insecurity go from 1 in 13 people to 1 in 8, with even higher numbers in households with children.

As the pandemic wreaks cruel economic damage across the world, hunger has become a rising factor. The British medical journal Lancet projected that the number of children under five entering a "wasting state"—that is, whose weight is dropping so far that they risk long-term health and developmental problems, or even death—is expected to grow by 14 percent, and that the number of people overall confronting potentially life-threatening levels of hunger would double this year to 265 million.