Moreover, I am not sure how accurate these numbers are in practice. E.g. I live in Germany. Most Germans (in West-Germany) had English in high school. So, according to these statistics they are probably part of the 2 billion.

Since I am not a native speaker of German, I sometimes try to start a conversation in English. For the far majority speaking English is difficult or they don't speak English at all, including people with a higher education (e.g. GPs).

I can fully understand, since I had five years of German in high school, but since I had rarely practiced since, I had similar difficulties speaking German.