‘We don’t know how it will end’: Hunger stalks amid virus

WASHINGTON (AP) — When all this started — when the coronavirus began stalking humanity like an animal hunting prey, when she and her husband lost their restaurant jobs overnight as the world shut down to hide, when she feared not being able to feed her family — Janeth went outside with a red kitchen towel.

It was Passover. Her pastor had told her about the roots of the Jewish holiday, about Israelites smearing a lamb’s blood on their doors as a sign for the plagues to pass them by. So Janeth, an immigrant from Honduras, reached up to hang the red towel over the door of her family’s apartment on the edge of the nation’s capital. It was close enough, she figured, “to show the angel of death to pass over our home.”

Pass us by, coronavirus.

And pass us by, hunger.

At night now, it’s the worry over food that keeps Janeth’s mind racing, and her heart, she says, hurting. “I spend hours thinking, thinking, about what we will do the next day, where we will find food the next day,” she says weeks into the coronavirus outbreak, her family’s food and cash both dwindling.

Janeth and her husband, Roberto, are part of the greatest surge in unemployment in the U.S. since the Depression, setting off a wave of hunger that is swamping food programs nationwide. The couple and every adult member of their extended family in the U.S. have lost their jobs in the economic lockdown prompted by the pandemic.

They are among the tens of millions in America — more than 1 out of every 6 workers — abruptly cut off from paychecks.

The Associated Press is withholding the couple’s full names because they are in the country illegally and could face deportation. Their immigration status, their problems with English and scanty access to the Internet all combine to block...