Also, the UK seems to do way more sequencing of the virus than any other country, so one would expect such cherry picking to actually happen in the UK.
According to the Danish Serum Institute, the UK is sequencing about 10% of the positive test results. The UK is considered a leader in this field in Europe including the British Isles.
For comparison, the Danish Serum Institute has a sequencing capacity about 5000 positive tests a week, a rate of around 25% of the positives at the current level.
New Zealand is achieving over 80% sequencing and more recently has gone over 90%. It's possibly more important when you have less cases so that you can find connections and react to them. It's also a lot easy to do when you have very few cases (<10 versus 30k+).
It is more likely that this is noted first in the UK. This means that there is some likelihood that it already exists in other countries, but was not notices yet.
However, this does not explains away that it appears to have much higher transmission.
Also the UK detected this new strain right next to the Dover Crossing - Isn't it pretty likely it came from mainland Europe and was detected at our port rather than we coincidentally had a mutation right on the border?
> The variant can be found across the UK, except Northern Ireland, but it is heavily concentrated in London, the South East and eastern England. Cases elsewhere in the country do not seem to have taken off.
> Data from Nextstrain, which has been monitoring the genetic codes of the viral samples around the world, suggest cases in Denmark and Australia have come from the UK. The Netherlands has also reported cases.
For comparison, the Danish Serum Institute has a sequencing capacity about 5000 positive tests a week, a rate of around 25% of the positives at the current level.
Source, in Danish, from the Serum Institute:
https://www.ssi.dk/aktuelt/nyheder/2020/ny-covid-virusstamme...