Other countries could soon share India’s misery if the U.S. doesn’t help to increase Covid sequencing rapidly around the world.

The cognitive dissonance is hard to manage. On the one hand, new Covid cases in the United States are declining as vaccinations rise. A vaccinated summer gleams on the horizon. But internationally, we are at the highest number of new Covid-19 infections ever recorded, the World Health Organization warned last week. And it’s only a matter of time before variants from other outbreaks make their way here.

India is now being ravaged by a near-vertical rise in cases and deaths. Officials and experts fear a new variant that could be both more transmissible and deadlier may be driving it. But it’s almost impossible to tell, for a very simple reason: India is currently sequencing less than 1 percent of its Covid cases. Read more at The New Republic.