The alarm following the identification of a new variant of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom, which is believed to be 70 percent more transmissible than the previous strain, is growing across the globe.

Many countries, including India, have already decided to impose a temporary ban on flights coming in from the UK. No flights from the UK will be allowed to land in India till the 31st of December.

Moreover, the government has made an RT-PCR test mandatory for all passengers from the UK who land anywhere in India between the 21st and the 23rd of December.

Passengers who test positive for COVID-19 will be placed under institutional isolation, while their samples would be sent for genome sequencing. That's not all, the authorities would also be following up with passengers who have arrived from the UK in the last four weeks for a status on their health.

In an exclusive interview to Shereen Bhan, minister for civil aviation Hardeep Singh Puri said that this is a temporary ban on flights from the UK and government will review the situation after 6 days on the further course of action.

Puri said, "We have been reasonably successful in navigating our way through this turbulence caused by the virus. By year-end or few weeks into the next quarter domestic civil aviation will be at pre-COVID levels of domestic traffic. On international flights, we are enabling passengers to travel not only to the 22 countries with which we have bilateral air-bubbles but through additional arrangements to travel to another 80 countries or so. I think in the first quarter of the New Year we will see some attempts to return to normalcy in terms of international civil aviation and we will have full restoration of pre-COVID levels in domestic civil aviation."

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(Edited by : Abhishek Jha)