What's in a name? For Indian travel start-up founder Kovid Kapoor, it has made him a social media sensation. The 31-year-old's Twitter profile declares: “My name is Kovid and I am not a virus.”

He posted this week that he had travelled outside India for the first time since the onset of the pandemic “and got a bunch of people amused by my name”.

“Future foreign trips are going to be fun!” he said in a tweet.

The comment triggered a barrage of jokes, memes, messages and interview requests, in a moment of light relief as the highly contagious Omicron variant sees case numbers surge in India.

The sudden spurt of attention was “totally unexpected”, but he hoped it would bring some publicity to his business during a “very difficult time” for the sector, he told AFP.