It’s odd that questions around whether we’ll be safe to ease lockdown over Christmas focus on whether prevalence has merely stopped rising, when what justified easing in the summer was:
• Several consecutive weeks of decline
• Reaching far lower levels than we’re now seeing

There’s a separate discussion to be had over whether the gov’t would be justified in using less strict criteria for a time-limited Christmas easing than it did for a longer-term and larger-scale easing in the summer, but either way we need a lot of before we’re at that point

NB I’m using hospital admission in those charts because:
a) cases are not comparable now vs spring
b) healthcare capacity is the scarce resource we need to protect
c) hospitalisations = severe illness that may lead to death, not "false positives", "mild cases", "casedemic" etc