Gandhi warns 'explosive' COVID wave threatens India and the world (yahoo.com)
"India is home to one out of every six human beings on the planet. The pandemic has demonstrated that our size, genetic diversity and complexity make India fertile ground for the virus to rapidly mutate, transforming itself into a more contagious and more dangerous form," wrote Gandhi.
"Allowing the uncontrollable spread of the virus in our country will be devastating not only for our people but also for the rest of the world."
India's highly infectious COVID-19 variant B.1.617 has already spread to other countries, and many nations have moved to cut or restrict movements from India.
British Prime Minister Boris said on Friday the government needed to handle very carefully the emergence of new coronavirus strains in India that have since started to spread in the United Kingdom.
Beyond India, a growing number of Asian countries are being ravaged by fresh coronavirus waves
By Nectar Gan, CNN
Updated 9:55 PM ET, Fri May 7, 2021
Beyond India, a growing number of Asian countries are engulfed by fresh coronavirus waves - CNN
(CNN)As India's coronavirus catastrophe worsens, new waves of infections are fast engulfing a growing number of nations across South and Southeast Asia -- with some grappling with their worst outbreaks since the pandemic began.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday that India had accounted for nearly half of all global infections and a quarter of deaths reported in the past week.
But cases have also skyrocketed in countries around India, from Nepal in the north to Sri Lanka and the Maldives in the south. And it's not just India's neighbors -- further away in Southeast Asia, infections are also surging in Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia.
"The Southeast Asia region reported over 2.7 million new cases and over 25,000 new deaths, a 19% and a 48% increase respectively compared to the previous week," the WHO said on Wednesday. "India is currently driving the vast majority of this upward trend."