Cmon Andy. According to the graphs you reference: October incidence is comparable to April, while October hospitalisation is much lower than in April.
Have another cup-o-joe and tell me why I'm wrong ;)
Have another cup-o-joe and tell me why I'm wrong ;)
As I wrote in the comment you replied to, "Of course there's better ability to detect cases." I thought that was obvious enough to not need further elaboration. I seem to have been wrong, so I will further clarify.
June is roughly when covid screening was available to everyone. Eg, the local pharmacy offers antibody testing. You'll see that's when the number of known cases went up even though the intensive care and death rates decreased.
Thus, it makes no sense to compare as you did October's reported case incidence - when widespread testing was available - directly with April's - when it was not.
In addition, the question I replied to was "has the spike in cases corresponded with a spike in hospitalizations?" The answer is still "yes". There has been a roughly four-fold increase in reported cases over the last six weeks, and there has been a roughly four-fold increase in the number of intensive care cases over the same period of time. That's by eyeball, so increases might not match that precisely, but it's still a correspondence.
Since the lockdown we have is no longer effective at keeping the rates low, it makes sense to "sharpen" the recommendations.
Tell me how I'm wrong that that's not a correspondence. And hopefully with less snark.
As for the curves. Do I interpret your point correctly as follows? The major factor of the discrepancy was the undetected cases in April vs October, due to lower testing? Does that hold true when comparing with the quite low numbers coming out of antibody screening? I remember this being drastically overestimated (4x?).
I cannot say if the major factor was due to lower testing. I can only say that the testing regimes were significantly different and so cannot be compared as directly as you did.