This coronavirus has, up until now, killed about four people for every 100 killed by the Spanish flu. However, it has been argued to me that the projected death toll matters too: that if the current measures had not been taken, Covid-19 could have caused even more deaths than the Spanish flu. On the other hand, it has also been projected that, because of quarantine, isolation, and restrictions of all kinds imposed by governments on societies, the global economy is declining to the point that in 2020 alone, there will have been 130 million more people facing crisis levels of hunger. To which we might add a similar number for this year, and who knows for how many more years, as state repression is extended. The UN World Food Programme has already warned that 2021 will be “the worst year of humanitarian crisis” since the end of World War II. According to the UN, levels of extreme poverty “have risen for the first time in 22 years” while Latin America is facing a “pandemic of hunger”, when one in three inhabitants last year already did not have access to nutritious and sufficient food. Now, how did the public reach such a state of panic about Covid-19? In the first place, many still trust “the authorities”; to which is added what in the stock markets is called FOMO, the fear of missing out on whatever the majority is opining; and finally, the enormous number of media outlets that are spreading panic. For example, headlines of news reports on UN warnings that about 10,000 children a month will die of hunger because of the coronavirus pandemic fail to highlight the contradiction: that, if these children die, it is surely not due to the pandemic, but due to hunger. Alejandro A. Tagliavini, Buenos Aires