[Mvandenbergh]

Sure, there's constant mutation and most of it is phenotypically meaningless. What caused the concern is that this particular set of mutations seem to be associated with a part of the country where the measured dose-response of lockdown measures suddenly went way down. In other words, the effectiveness of a particular set of lockdown measures seemed to suddenly go down in Kent and London but not other parts of the country including parts of the country that had previously shown similar responses to lockdown measures. Either everyone in Kent is suddenly breaking the rules more than people elsewhere, this is unfortunate random variation driven by a few super spreading events (totally possible), or this is the first phenotypically distinct variant (as opposed to irrelevant sequence mutations) which has emerged.

Let's hope it's nothing but I'm glad that measures have been taken now.