Malnutrition is putting hundreds of millions of people around the world at increased risk from coronavirus, according to a report that follows warnings that global hunger could double because of the pandemic.
The Global Nutrition Report, a UN-backed audit published on Tuesday, laid bare the scale of the poor diets that make people in lower-income countries and disadvantaged groups within richer ones more susceptible to the virus.
It comes after a projection from the World Food Programme that numbers facing acute hunger will rise from 130m to 265m people as poorer countries’ already fragile economies are devastated by Covid-19 lockdowns. The International Labour Organization has said that 1.6bn workers in the informal economy — about half the total global workforce — were at risk of losing their livelihoods.