The real pandemic risk from India is tracking new variants of Covid-19

As countries help India, they should ask for greater genomic scrutiny of the emerging strains of the virus.

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.  

The stakes underlying