Covid in August and September
I for one am not at all happy with the way this is going. To me the risk of long-term covid is significant and scary and signifies a likelihood of quite life-changing damage. The articles in adjacent pieces about the way the devolved nations (not England) behave differently (better, in my head) remain pointed (at, to be read and thought about). As you can see bothe Scotland and N Ireland are having issues in early September. Meanwhile we are apparently happy at having typically 35000 new cases a day, 7500 (and still rising) in hospital with covid and that deaths are steady at 100 or so per day. Meanwhile in NewZealand,which was still at lockdown 4 on 4Sep, their 7-day average is 39 new cases. Data source. Auckland remains on lockdown level 4 with around 39phut, which you can compare with Corby, the worst in England today at 536phut (while a lot of Scotland is over 700 phut). On cases per million the US and UK are about the same (see) at the moment and it is only the case fatilty rate that makes the UK look a little competent. (Bottom of this page and here, setting the metric as case fatality and interval as 7-day rolling average.)
Go to Covid dashboard @ Guardian for the current position
From the PHE source, covid health data,
Here is the prediction of hospital resource used.
Daily infections and testing - and the prediction of how that will change...
Next, observed and predicted mask use (right); beside, left, social distancing and the prediction.
This last chart perhaps goes some way to explain the UK attitude. Given the difference between policies in Australia and the UK, the fatality rate is, to my mind, the wrong way around. I've left Bulgaria in as a demonstration of, relatively speaking, failure in health care. Of course, one has to trust what is being reported and this is the big problem in comparisons between states.