We would expect hospitalisation duration of stay and severity, and therefore instantaneous numbers hospitalised, to improve anyway, because the medicine has improved a lot since earlier in the year.

And that chance to significantly improve the medicine was helped, hopefully, by the "flatten the curve" policies intended to delay the spread of the disease regardless of whether the number of people getting it would end up the same.

So you can't directly compare both waves. A lot of things have changed between them.

This is substantially wrong. Medicine has not improved at all over the time period. There are still no accepted treatments for the virus. They stand by the same treatments they have always used for treating the sick For a non-curable virus, fluids and steroids.