Thing with deaths is that, as others have noted, many go unreported.

What I've looked at so far are IC admissions. As that depends the least on policy I think. Moreover, its the thing we most want to control (i.e. you want peak IC admissions not to go over IC capacity).

I've been using this to judge the effectiveness of measures taken in the Netherlands though. Which is quite different from using it to measure R_0 or R_t in other countries with other data.