Luv, Since I am currently living in Mozambique and have spent the past 7 years actively fighting malaria throughout Africa, arboviruses in Latin American/the Caribbean and now HIV in Mozambique I can tell you that it is OK for us to worry about COVID in the US. IMHO human beings should have the capacity to work on more than one disease/issue at a time. I agree that most Americans do not pay enough attention to food insecurity because it does not affect them and it's not "contagious" but my response would be that the existence of malaria or the fact that starvation kills should not be our excuse to not take reasonable precautions against COVID. We should be working on food insecurity AND malaria AND COVID. In fact, COVID is compromising malaria control programs (net distribution, IRS campaigns), contributing to possible increases in deaths from malaria (and HIV and TB, etc...) in the future. Also, one minor clarification, human actions have cut malaria deaths by more than half from the 1 million you cited down to 405k in the most recent reported year. That means that, even if you assume over-reporting and you reduce the COVID deaths in the Hopkins tracker by 30%, there have still been more deaths from COVID in the first 8 months of 2020 than in all of 2018 from malaria.
Finally, you can hide behind "don't be offended I'm just an old guy" but there were plenty of offensive comments and stereotypes in your post. From what I've seen, there are very few whiney or ill-informed people on this page. We might not always disagree but everyone seems to be intelligent and articulate. FWIW, I am a minority and I have never been on welfare/lived in a ghetto/been overweight but my husband's family periodically relied on food stamps because the job his mother had cleaning at hotels and the two jobs his father had working at a fish farm and maintaining lawns was not always enough to put food on the table. And the reason those were their jobs was not because they were fat and lazy. It was because they grew up in a very segregated south in the early 1900s when higher education and upward mobility was nearly impossible for black people.
As you said, please don't be offended, but do think about it.