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Just as the world was starting to hope for vaccines to usher in a healthier 2021 UK on Sunday cautioned against a highly contagious and mutated strain of coronavirus. Prime Minister Boris Johnson placed London and surrounding areas under the most stringent lockdown since March, effectively cancelling Christmas. “When the virus changes its method of attack, we must change our method of defense,” he said at a press conference on Sunday.

"Considering the prevailing situation in UK, the government of India has decided that all flights originating from UK to India to be suspended till 31st December," said the aviation ministry after a joint monitoring group on COVID-19 met this morning to discuss the mutant coronavirus that has spread rapidly in the UK, sending cases rocketing within days.

Canada, Saudi Arabia, and several European countries have suspended flights from the UK over the new strain, believed to be 70 per cent more infectious. British Health Secretary Matt Hancock says "the new variant is out of control".

The variant, a mutant of SARS-CoV-2, was first detected in September. By December, about two-thirds of Covid-19 cases in the UK were due to this new variant.

Not unexpectedly, all of these meteoric developments proved more than enough for Twitter to deal with at the moment, as netizens took to social media to express concern over what they referred to as '#COVID20' — a play on the year 2020 and the moniker 'COVID 2.0' — to signify the new threat which has come up in the form of the novel coronavirus strain.

Interestingly, a similar strain has been found in a few cases in Italy, Australia as well as South Africa, making the countries even more cautious with travel restrictions.