Quote Originally Posted by xsnaggle View Post
So a paper that continually knocks the government (often quite righlty) takes a set of numbers from that same govenment and prints them in a national daily without someone doing the simple sum of adding them up or taking them away?

Aboslutely stunning journalism!!!!!
What? You are blaming the Guardian for reprinting the UK government's official statistics from Public Health Englands dashboard. The About Data part of the GOV.UK website explains the discrepancy

COVID-19 cases are identified by taking specimens from people and sending these specimens to laboratories around the UK to be tested. If the test is positive, this is a referred to as a lab-confirmed case.

There are separate reporting processes for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Each Nation provides data based on tests carried out in NHS (and PHE) laboratories. These represent 'pillar 1' of the Government's mass testing programme. The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) combines the counts from the 4 Nations, and adds data from tests carried out by commercial partners ('pillar 2' of the mass-testing programme) to give daily and total (cumulative) counts of lab-confirmed cases. These are submitted to Public Health England (PHE) to display on the dashboard. The 4 figures are not all taken from the same cut-off time: England and Scotland counts are as at 9am on the day of publication; Wales counts are as at 7am on the day of publication; Northern Ireland counts are from different times on the morning of publication.

The headline UK case count is published by DHSC each day via Twitter and on the DHSC website.

The UK total is not the sum of the 4 National totals as the pillar 2 cases cannot currently be included in the National totals. All other data on this website are based only on cases detected through pillar 1. Information about the different pillars is available on GOV.UK.