COVID infections in England had been falling since July. But the proportion of people testing positive started to rise again in the first few days of September.
At its July peak the Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimated that roughly 3.1 million people in England (1 in 17 people) tested positive, but by the first week in September this had fallen to 700,000. During the week ending September 17 (the most recent ONS data we have at the time of writing) almost 900,000 people were estimated to be infected in England.
There’s always a lag between new infections starting to increase and this being reflected in the figures, so the number of new daily cases will have begun to rise about a week before the end of August. And the number of people infected by now is likely to be somewhat greater than 900,000.
