Hi, I'm Dan Premack and welcome to Axios Recap, where we dig into one big story.

Today's Tuesday, May 11th. Diet program sales are up, credit card debt is down, and we're focused on India's coronavirus crisis.

Try to take yourself back to this time last year, when the pandemic felt like this

giant chasm into which the entire country was falling. Helplessly, as death count soared,

hospitals were overloaded, those tests were tough to come by, and equipment like ventilators

and face masks were in short supply.

Life was, at best, on hold.

At worst, for many, it was over.

That's India, right now.

The most recent daily case count was 330,000,

which is about the same number of people who live in Honolulu,

or in Corpus Christi, Texas. Deaths today

surpassed 3,800, and many believe that count would be even higher if testing was better,

if hospitals could handle even more patients, or if mass graves and cremations were being tracked

more accurately. An India's COVID crisis is spreading beyond its own borders, not only because cases are rising

in neighboring South Asian countries, but also because there's a new variant, first detected

in India that the World Health Organization says is a concern because of its increased transmissibility.

There are also some limited, non-peer-reviewed studies, suggesting this variant may be better at evading some

protections of Western vaccines. Although, to be very clear here, much more research is still needed.

Remember, coronavirus variants are created via person-to-person transmission, and India has hundreds

of thousands of newly infected people per day, with some experts arguing that the

real numbers could be in the millions. So today we wanted to speak with Karin-deep Singh,

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