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I think most likely lots of factors. As mentioned before, football finished, hot weather keeping people outside, 1m+ isolating having been pinged, people kind-of-isolating so they don't get pinged before holidays, reduction in testing in schools and vaccines doing their thing.
It's really good news (if somewhat surprising). Assuming another spike in the next couple of weeks and starting from lower rates than expected, we hopefully won't get to the 100k daily cases that were projected.
villa-ru-
I see all of that - just dont see how without the last bits (vaccine plus infection based immunity) you would get a reduction in cases. All the other things probably mean a less steep rise, but not a decline.
The big question is clearly does testing data = real world infection levels and only hospital admissions will give us this answer really.
Scrabble
Given what we know about the virus - if infection rates are dropping is the only plausible explanation that we've reached those sunlit uplands of herd immunity?
No one seems able to explain it. For infections to be dropping in the real world at a rate similar to what we can see in the testing data would require an R rate significantly below 1 wouldn't it?
It is baffling.