COVID-19 may be waning in the U.S., but it rages elsewhere, which threatens our progress; we must intervene for all our sakes

The mood in the U.S. feels hopeful, but for tens of millions of others across the world the darkest days of the pandemic are just beginning. As the head of the Baltimore-based international humanitarian organization Catholic Relief Services (CRS) — and a man who recently lost family in India to the coronavirus — I can attest to the COVID-19 tsunami unfurling elsewhere. In Nepal, COVID cases have overtaken a struggling health care system. In Brazil, children are dying at alarmingly high rates. And in certain parts of India, the air is thick with crematorium smoke.