UKH

Not the most pleasant subject, but I suspect a lot of people are watching these numbers looking for the much hoped peak. One thing that doesn't make sense, why is the UK the only country with daily deaths at or above the level of critical/serious cases. All others it's a fraction - as might be expected. Is the UK just no longer updating critical numbers?

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

Perhaps the UK's rate of cardiovascular health issues could be a factor, when combined with the advice to self isolate?

I can only speculate (I don't have time to do more research), but it might be with the way deaths are recorded. In France, deaths in retirement homes are not part of the official death toll:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/Can-we-trust-France-s-coronavirus-casua... :
An owl-eared journalist picked this up in the questions. He asked about the deaths in old peoples’ homes, retirement homes, nursing homes and individual homes. Prof. Salomon, utterly imperturbed, carefully explained that France only recorded deaths in hospitals because it was too complicated to record the others scientifically. Those deaths would eventually be integrated to the official statistics at a later date by the national statistical agency. He admitted, however, that hospital deaths ‘only represent a small part of deaths’. And he added that the ‘two principal places of death are the hospital and nursing homes.’

I've noticed this. no. in critical care stayed at 20 for ages  and i see it's now 163, but I think it's old or unreliable data reporting. Similarly no new "Recovered" cases reported since March 23rd - This is also what's skewing our death rate (90%!)

There is so much variability in these numbers that really the best thing to do is to try to look at general trends, rather than focus on a few days results. Firstly, the number of deaths depend on the number of infections of 2-3 weeks before; however we have little or no way of knowing what that number is, or how that corresponds with critical cases of a week later.

A number of posters have noted that reporting changes in local authorities have made big spikes one way or another. There is no adequate testing data that we are aware of, only reports of tests on patients admitted into hospital.

Personally I'm looking at daily changes in infections and deaths reported as these depend on actual test results and the real world.

Finally there are a number of expert statisticians posting on our forum, who are debating the interpretation of the inconclusive data we have so far on a continuous basis, as are the authorities.

You may want to check out Mark Handley's graphs, which are as good as I have found; however they are not particularly optimistic.

http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/

Sorry for the negative post; hopefully we'll have a better idea in a week or two.

Edit: typo

I too noticed the "critical" being stuck at 20 for some time. Since there were more than 20 deaths/day at that point I surmised that it was just not being updated/reported. Since most deaths would have gone "through" critical care, I couldn't see any way "critical" would be less than "deaths".

Deaths in nursing homes will be included in the official French stats "soon"  according to the same interviewer you quote - see https://www.pourquoidocteur.fr/Articles/Question-d-actu/31918-Coronavirus-V...

That site is usually quite good at flagging up bogus numbers, but the UK critical and recovered both seem to be stuck.