1. WARNINGS BY EXPERTS WENT UNHEEDED

FOREWARNED IS FOREARMED. This maxim holds good for all nations trying to combat the waves of Covid-19 that threaten the world today. Yet the Narendra Modi government, which had acted with alacrity during the first wave, was surprisingly complacent, not keeping track of mutations of the virus that could trigger a second wave of infections—as it did in the US and the UK and is now doing in India. When the first wave raged, barring two institutes, the Delhi-based Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) and the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad, there was no coordinated national effort to sequence Covid samples to detect the most dominant variants and to ascertain if any