Well, from now on, NHS updates all results at 9AM concerning the events of the previous day. As such, the values obtained from today are significantly skewed, both in terms of new infections and fatalities, although that will eventually be diluted over time. Even then, and although the number of new fatalities (5) was significantly reduced as compared with the previous day, that reduction was due to the new calculation time, rather than any solid good news.
The other change is regarding the testing methods. UK and most northern european countries are now not testing all cases, but only those which are severe enough to need hospital attention. This makes the “new cases” indicator a totally useless figure. This fact has dire consequences. To start, it doesn’t allow the government even to estimate the extent of the epidemics, so it can’t even know to close it is to a potencial herd immunity threshold. Then, the only hard data is is either the number of severely sick, of the number of dead, and those come at a price, other than the human life: delay. It’s not possible to easily measure on the patient was originally infected after being brought in to the ER, and even if you do, it only comes with a significant delay in excess of a week.
All said and done, it prevents government from offering the thing its citizens want the most: to know the current situation and the effects of the measures, except by default, having the entire population panicking due hundreds dying the previous day. By then it’s far too late and the harm as already been done for those already infected.
Given the cheer difficulty on having hard data, the best we can forecast is 2486 total known infections, corresponding to actual 48.000, and 76 cumulative deaths, which at 7PM was already at 71.
As usual the source spreadsheet is available here.