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According to a climbing guide, at least 100 in the Everest climbing industry (climbers, guides, and support staff) have gotten COVID.

There are fresh waves of COVID surging throughout Asia, ranging from Nepal to Sri Lanka. COVID cases in India topped 20 million. Things have gotten so bad that cricket, one of the nation’s favorite pastimes, has been halted. India’s vaccination rates are plummeting, thanks partly to the collapsing healthcare system in the country and shortages of the Russian vaccine.

A group of India’s leading industrialists urged the country to slow economic activity in order to save lives. The group’s urgings come as India’s daily COVID cases surpassed 400,000 for the first time, signaling a grim new turn in the virus’s spread in that country.

The United States has limited travel from India as the country suffers under a massive COVID surge. Perhaps the United States is worried about new strains getting into the country, since India blamed its COVID spike on variants of the virus. Meanwhile, India is planning to allow the annual Amarnath pilgrimage, which may see as many as 600,000 pilgrims, despite being the midst of an unprecedented COVID crisis, with cases surging well beyond the country’s capability. In the penultimate week of April, India saw 341,000 COVID cases in a single day. The spike in cases is partly due to some of the new variants spreading around the world––but the spike also raises concerns about new variants emerging in the country more than one billion people. Should too many new variants emerge, the spike could get worse elsewhere. What’s worse, if the variants bypass the vaccine then we could be set back to zero.

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