@UncomfortableSilence
At the risk of sounding incredibly uneducated, I also currently have a shocking dose of Covid so please be kind
Can you catch each of these mutations individually?
I know Flu mutates and the vaccination is adjusted accordingly so is this the same here?
So for example I am in one of the top London boroughs for infection so assume I have this new strain could I then go on to catch the one they are talking about today?
There is nothing uneducated about asking a sensible question.
Nobody can give you an absolute guaranteed answer to that question - and commiserations because when I got it I felt like my life was drained out of me for a few weeks!
It is possible that different strains may be contracted - or even that the same strain can be contracted again at a later stage. But there is not actual evidence to say that, and studying what we know of this virus and what we know about the way many viruses act, then the answer is that you would probably not get reinfected by a strain unless it was a massively significant change (there is no reason to assume that is the case here) and even if you did there is a very good chance that you would be asymptomatic or get a mild infection. The strains are not so significantly different from each other that your bodies natural defences wouldn't recognise and fight any further infection.
Think about it like this. Once upon a time (and it would be so long ago that I can't tell you when) we did not recognise flu in any variation. It was also once a new virus. Over time our bodies have become used to it and when we encounter it our bodies know what to do to fight it off. If that doesn't work we might get a bad does of flu. Flu is a serious disease, but it is so commonplace that we joke about it all the time. It's just commonplace for us. But for the elderly and the vulnerable it has always been dangerous even after however long it has been since we first encountered it. So we have a vaccine that helps our bodies fight it better if we are more vulnerable to it. The flu vaccine isn't a magic bullet. And a very few healthy younger people die of flu every year. Or get post viral syndrome. I am afraid that a close friend of mine -54 years old and healthy - died last week having contracted flu that developed into pneumonia. Not Covid, flu.
So the chances are that no, you won't get another dose of it, and probably not for many months. We know that once the body recognises the virus it swings into action. We also know that it isn't entirely foreign to our bodies as it has been shown that some people have an immediate immune response anyway - this is not the only coronavirus out there, and one of the causes of the common cold is a coronavirus.
The trick to getting through this is to stay calm and be sensible. Anxiety actually impacts on the immune system! If you are ill, rest, relax, eat what you can, stay hydrated, and try to distract yourself from negative thoughts. If you contract the virus, you may be unlucky and get a bad case. But the chances of it being worse than that are very slim, and far less than you would imagine if you spend too much time on Mumsnet. The virus is potentially dangerous to a small group of people who are also vulnerable to lots of other viruses. That is about the people more than about the virus. We need to support them, and to protect a health service that has been savaged by cuts to manage treating the worst cases. But most people still haven't had the virus, the risk of catching it is still small albeit increasing, and the chances of a bad outcome for most people is vanishingly small. Keep it in perspective and don't make more of it than it is.
And for the person who asked if I could be Minister for Health - I don't think governments have a great interest in the truth, only in themselves. That isn't something that interests me. But it would be helpful if the minister stopped using words like "dangerous" in association with the virus - it mostly isn't dangerous - and started using them in association with the governments savage cuts to health and social care, support for the disadvantaged and so on. And that is despite having been warned in 2016 that the cuts had led to a dangerous unpreparedness for a pandemic when one one occured again. The government is much more dangerous than any virus.