How Will We Know If There’s a Covid Supervariant? India’s severe outbreak shows why the world needs early warning systems for variants that could evade vaccines. CHRISTOPHE ARCHAMBAULT/AFP/Getty Images A lab technician in France works on Covid genome sequencing. The cognitive dissonance is hard to manage. On the one hand, new Covid cases in the United States are declining as vaccinations rise. A vaccinated summer gleams on the horizon. But internationally, we are at the highest number of new Covid-19 infections ever recorded, the World Health Organization warned last week. And it’s only a matter of time before variants from other outbreaks make their way here.