NEW DELHI (AP) — A potentially worrisome variant of the coronavirus detected in India may spread more easily. But the country is behind in doing the testing needed to track the variant and understand it better. The World Health Organization has designated the Indian version a “variant of concern,” alongside those first detected in Britain, South Africa and Brazil. The surging number of people infected in India gives the virus more opportunities to mutate, and genetic monitoring is needed to identify if those mutations are making the virus more deadly. But India is sequencing around 1% of its virus cases, and not all of the results are added in a genome database.
