Is the Real Risk From India Being Detected?
Out of self-interest, the rest of the world better help quickly to understand how a Covid variant is devastating the country.
India and the rest of the world must pull out the stops to understand what’s happening there.
Photographer: Rebecca Conway/Getty Images
If you haven’t heard of B.1.617 yet, chances are you soon will.
This particular Covid-19 variant is at least partly behind the overwhelming second wave in India, the current global epicenter of the pandemic. The World Health Organization has now raised B.1.617 from a “variant of interest” to a “variant of concern.” Authorities like Public Health England are already treating it as the latter, meaning there’s something worrying about one or more of the criteria on which a virus is judged — including how fast it transmits, how many it kills, and whether it evades detection or makes vaccines less effective.