Household food insecurity in Canada early in the COVID-19 pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Food insecurity linked to insufficient income is an important determinant of health. Whether the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated levels of food insecurity in Canada, particularly among vulnerable groups, is unclear. This study estimated the proportion of Canadians reporting experience of household food insecurity six to nine months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and drew comparisons with pre-pandemic levels. DATA AND METHODS: Data on household food security status during the pandemic came from the population-based cross-sectional Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) collected from September to December 2020. Analyses were based on 26,831 respondents aged 12 and older residing in the 10 provinces. The Household Food Security Survey Module was used to categorize respondents' household food security status within the previous 12 months as food secure or marginally, moderately or severely insecure. The percentage of Canadians reporting some experience of household food insecurity was estimated for the overall population and for various sociodemographic groups. T-tests were used to draw comparisons with pre-pandemic rates from the 2017/2018 CCHS. RESULTS: In fall 2020, 9.6% of Canadians reported having experienced some level of food insecurity in their household in the prior 12 months, which is lower than the estimate of 12.6% from 2017/2018. Overall estimates were also lower in fall 2020 when examined within levels of household food insecurity (i.e., marginal, moderate or severe). The percentage of Canadians reporting experience of household food insecurity was either unchanged or lower than in 2017/2018 among sociodemographic groups vulnerable to experiencing income-related food insecurity, including renters and those with lower levels of education. INTERPRETATION: During the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in fall 2020, about 1 in 10 Canadians aged 12 and older reported experience of food insecurity in their household in the previous 12 months. This proportion was lower compared with 2017/2018, both overall and among several groups at higher risk of food insecurity. Monitoring household food insecurity will continue to be important during the COVID-19 pandemic and throughout the years of recovery ahead.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".