[katieHaylor (OP)]

Hansa says:

If people are getting the South African strain of COVID without travelling or leaving their homes, is it possible it can be passed from packaging on food (eg fruit and veg imported and supplied and purchased from supermarkets and shops)?

[alancalverd]

I think that names like "Kent" or South African" may be misleading. They refer to the place where the variant was first reported, but the virus mutates frequently and spontaneously, and only a few mutations will be both viable and highly infectious, so it's quite likely that a given viable variant will occur in several places at about the same time.

Remember there are reports of COVID appearing in Spanish sewage a year before the Wuhan outbreak, but nobody made a fuss about it. It's often the case that something remains "hidden in plain sight" until some trigger event, when suddenly everyone can see it.