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Hi and welcome to COVID Quickly, a scientific American podcast series.

This is your fast track update on the COVID pandemic we bring you up to speed on the science

behind the most urgent questions about the virus and the disease. We demystify the research

and help you understand what it really means. I'm Tanya Lewis,

and I'm Josh Fishman. We're a scientific American senior health editors. Today we're discussing

whether human behavior or virus variants led to India's COVID catastrophe. And we'll talk about

ways to make sense of CDC's new mass guidance and what it means when we're coming out of the caves

we've been in for the past year. The COVID situation in India right now is just devastating.

His body is piling up and shortages of critical supplies like oxygen.

Big question is how did things get so bad? Josh, you've been looking at two possible culprits.

What can you tell us? The first thing I can say is that people want to blame new virus variants as

one of those culprits. But they're wrong. Experts say the problem stems from what people,

not variants, have done in India. The country has gone from 100 to 200 deaths per day in the first

months of this year to a shocking climb in April and May. About 4,000 people are dying of COVID

every day now. And as you say everyone wants to know why this happened. Many seem eager to blame

a new variant. The BBC and other media like calling it the double mutant. Because that sounds

...