Cool: Even without specifically testing for the new covid-variant discovered in the UK, it’s possible to estimate an upper bound for its prevalence using standard tests.
Most covid tests look for several segments of the virus’ genome. Some of them look for one of the segments that’s changed in that variant. They’ll still match on the other segments, but not that one.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/30/22206522/coronavirus-test-variant-contagious-uk-gene