Hardeep Singh Puri
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Flight services between India and UK will resume from January 8, 2021, Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri said on Friday.

Last month, these services were suspended to stop the spread of a mutant Covid-19 starin which was recently discovered in the UK.

In a tweet, the minister said: "It has been decided that flights between India & UK will resume from 8 Jan 2021."

"Operations till 23 Jan will be restricted to 15 flights per week each for carriers of the two countries to & from Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru & Hyderabad only. @DGCAIndia will issue the details shortly."

Several countries including India had suspended flight services to the UK in the wake of the new mutant Covid-19 strain.

A total of 29 people have tested positive for the new UK variant of SARS-CoV-2 in India so far, the Union Health Ministry said on Friday.

These include the 25 cases which were announced till Thursday.

"All the 29 persons are in physical isolation in health facilities," an official said.

Of the 29, the mutated UK strain was detected in the samples of eight persons at the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) in New Delhi, two in the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), Delhi, one in the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics (NIBMG), Kalyani (near Kolkata), five in the National Institute of Virology in Pune, three in Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad and 10 were sequenced at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences Hospital (NIMHANS) Bengaluru.

Comprehensive contact tracing has been initiated for co-travellers, family contacts and others, the ministry said.