India’s shocking surge in Covid cases follows baffling decline
Analysis: Rapid spread of cases across country comes after long spell in which virus seemed almost to vanish
More than a million new infections in four days, rampant oxygen shortages and the Indian capital, Delhi, awash with sirens: this is what happens when wildly infectious new variants hit a population that was no longer socially distancing, or never could.
That mutations of the virus that causes Covid-19 are to blame for the catastrophe spreading across India is the best guess of epidemiologists and other scientists confronting one of the most aggressive waves of the pandemic witnessed anywhere in the world.