Guessing Daly just meant it behaves like flu with seasons.
Anyways...
https://scitechdaily.com/does-covid-...-organization/
...that's roughly where people are with Covid seasonality. Likely a factor, for multiple reasons, but it's just one force moving the numbers. Human behavior tends to push it to the back/middle of the list. Most often seen when it gets colder. And that's how it works with flu.
Last year when the virus was first introduced to different states is a really iffy thing to look at. For the first 6 months the weather likely didn't even make the top 10 of reasons why it was spreading where and how fast.
But yea hospitalizations is a far better metric to look at than cases and in the end when we look at how well vaccines (or any other measures) worked we're going to be looking at deaths. Comparing last years cases to this years cases just isn't comparable.