uk lockdowns are in response to hospitalisations. not due to asymptomatic infections.
the UK lockdowns are more about the view that people are not following the current guideance at advisory level eg 'if you can work from home do so' and so if people are not bothering to stay home if they can.. eventually they will be made to..
the strain talked about in the news is 1in 4000 'strains' of this particular covid19 heritage
the strain in particular is about 24 'generations' of mutations deep
meaning like a tree/ancestry this particular strain has changed minimally by 24 minor details out of many thousands
yes there are other strains that are 24 minor alterations. but it is shown that this particular strain in question. seems to be being passed around by lots of people avoiding following the advice.
this strain doesnt have any characteristics that show that its more dangerous. but its simply that they can identify and trace the contact people have and follow the path of where a certain strain has originated and then migrated to via people having ignorance.
..
you could run a real life scenario
pick 5 people. and tell them if they do come into close contact with someone either by accident or on purpose to spray paint a colour on someones back. and advise then to try not to come into contact. but if they o to then tell that person the same advice.
then give those 5 people a different colour spraycan to use
after a month. you can then look at a populations back and count how many of which colour. and then know which group are more idiots and ignorant. just by counting their backs
it does not mean that the colour is more dangerous. it just means the
people that come into contact with each other in that cluster-colour are more ignorantly dangerous
EG southwest UK seems to show more sensible attitudes so they have less cases. yet london seem to mingle more so they get more cases. and londoners seem to the migrate to other cities up north. and cause them to then have issues.
you end up seeing that a certain strain originating from london then has more cases. not due to the strain but due to attitudes of londoners.
..
anyway the minor changes of the spike in this 24th generation strain. is not sufficiently different to cause worry about the vaccine.
what would be a worry is if any strain went into the animal population. then mutated there. then came back to the human population. as crossing the 'animal divide' can cause major mutations
EG instead of 24differences out of 30000identicals (99.93% identical) of the strains of human covid19
emphasis all different human-human strain in america, uk, netherlands, italy are 0.07% max different.
a human-animal-human may very by 5-40%
like how covid19(sars-human 2003 > bat species 1 > bat species 2 > human) is about 82% identical to sars 2003
mers to covid is even further difference
as for the species divide
like how covid 19 human is 8% different to covid 19 pangolin
both examples above had wide mutations of many percentage points due to them not handling cross species infection pre 2020
as oppose to spotting infections in minks and how the mink is only 0.07% different due to them stoping it spreading amungst the mink quick, thus avoiding mutations which could have become many percentage points different if it re entered the human population later