The article includes a month-by-month graph of incident counts, broken down by company, that shows the "skyrocketing" behavior starting in March of this year.

The article notes that the data is incomplete, but that only means that there are more incidents than the graph shows.

And I'd also expect that part of the reason for the increase is that there are many more miles driven now by AVs than a year ago. But in a way that doesn't matter: an absolute increase in incidents is a problem, regardless of how much driving is going on.

This is especially the case when we're talking about things that human drivers are less likely to do, like driving through caution tape and snagging Muni wires. Not sure how often human drivers run over fire hoses or drive directly into active fire scenes, but I'd expect it's not often when compared with AV software that seems to just not know it's supposed to avoid those things.