We need to not read too much into cases alone. Yes, they are a metric of interest but we are now doing much more testing and that testing is targeted at known contacts of those who test positive.
Other metrics such as calls to NHS 111 etc are just as important. Also crucial is the ONS
estimate of cases across the whole of the population, not just a small section of the population which is almost certainly going to contain people who currently have the virus.
Where we head from now on will be mostly dependent on what proportion of the population is still susceptible to infection. Below is a link to the REACT2 study from Imperial.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.12.20173690v2
A quote from the pre-print....... "We estimate that 3.36 million (3.21, 3.51) people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 in England to end June 2020, with an overall infection fatality ratio of 0.90% (0.86, 0.94)."
This estimate was based on antibody response from tests of ~100,000 adults. If antibody response was the only indicator of infection this 3.36 million figure would not be good news. It would likely leave a large proportion of the population still susceptible. However, as many people suggested early on (but without evidence) there may be other immune responses at work (and there have been in vivo studies which do support this) which mean the susceptible population will be a lot lower than first thought. That is good news, but we don't know how much lower. We need to find out.
Rather than be solely worried about case numbers we (the country, government, scientists) need to be looking at those cases and asking questions such as:
1) How many people who test positive are symptomatic or asymptomatic?
2) How many of those who test positive develop antibody response?
3) How many who test positive don't develop an antibody response? (That would be a very interesting figure to have!).
While antibody testing can be complex and testing for the other forms of immunity even more so we have the capability within the UK to be figuring this out. Unfortunately, as Sir Paul Nurse pointed out a good few months back, the government hasn't utilised expertise in either the public or private sector to answer important questions.