India's two biggest cities, New Delhi and Mumbai, are under new, strict COVID-19 restrictions to contain a virus surge. 

New infections surpassed 200,000 on Thursday.

In New Delhi, hotels and banquet halls have been converted into COVID-19 centers and cemeteries are running low on space.

Experts say political rallies for local and state elections and a Hindu festival, which were superseder events that helped fuel this latest wave of COVID-19 infections and deaths.

India's deep recession during the pandemic plunged more people into poverty. India's middle class shrank by around 32 million people in 2020 because of the pandemic, according to the PEW Research Center.

"It has set back our growth trajectory hugely and created much greater inequality," Jayati Ghosh, a development economist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst told the New York Times.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is facing criticism over his response to COVID-19.

Although several cities have imposed restrictions and some states are under lockdown, Modi has not enacted a new national lockdown.

COVID-19 vaccines have also been in short supply and their rollout has been slow. But the government has fast-tracked approvals for foreign-made vaccines.

India promises to increase vaccine supply to almost 100 million doses by September, Reuters reports.

But as new cases and deaths continue to rise under this new surge, experts warn, new variants could keep emerging.

"Where you have that many people affected, there's a higher chance of new strains because there are more opportunities for the virus to mutate," said Alina Chan, a postdoctoral researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard told The Wall Street Journal.

In March, India's health ministry labs detected all three current COVID-19 variants within population samples, as well as a new "double-mutant variant."

Public health experts think it might have originated in India, The Wall Street Journal reports. 

Scientists still don’t know enough about this new virus strain, but Dr. Benjamin Pinsky, director of the Clinical Virology Laboratory at Stanford University, says the variant has already been found in California.

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