Indian entrepreneur named Kovid says he will never change his name

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 that had been liked 40,000 times and received 4,000 retweets by Friday.

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.