This is a long, interesting thread on how much more transmissible B.1.1.7 (aka "the UK variant") really is. https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1380513950832414723

One thing I'd add is that contact-tracing data from the UK found an advantage of ~33% (as compared to the 50-70% that you sometimes see cited elsewhere) and I can imagine contact-tracing is more robust than methods based on statistical extrapolation.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/959426/Variant_of_Concern_VOC_202012_01_Technical_Briefing_5.pdf

As a non-expert on this stuff, I don't necessarily trust my judgment to sort out competing expert claims.

However, I do find it interesting when there's a range of expert opinion and only a certain portion of that range tends to make it into popular media coverage about COVID.

You see something similar now where the mainstream press treats it as all but inevitable that the US will experience a new surge. Certainly possible and *some* experts do expect one. And yet, the models tracked by the CDC are *all over the place*; there's no consensus at all.

There's something analogous here to the "wet bias" in meteorology, where TV meteorologists semi-deliberately overpredict rain because reputationally they tend to get more criticism for false negatives (it rains when they say it won't) than false positives. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/magazine/the-weatherman-is-not-a-moron.html