I will add that it's very common for what doctors believe to be "latent" T1D to be "triggered" by a viral episode. The theory is that the body is somehow prime

I will add that it's very common for what doctors believe to be "latent" T1D to be "triggered" by a viral episode. The theory is that the body is somehow primed to have the auto-immune response, and that it is essentially inevitable, but it takes some unrelated stress/immune response to kick off the cascading failure. In that regard it wouldn't be surprising to see the typical rate of T1D diagnosis just happening to be triggered by the currently predominant virus, i.e. COVID, but in that case you would expect to see the tell-tale antibodies, and the overall incidence rate of T1D in the population would not spike.