Have been looking at/mildly obsessed with European excess mortality statistics, and it's clear that England (not Britain) is definitely an outlier - presumably because of the care homes issue (1/?)
This site collects weekly mortality estimates from most of the main European countries (although only a couple of German states). The data here is essentially the same as that reported by the ONS (so has the same time lags) euromomo.eu
Its graphs show 'Z-scores' - variation in mortality rates vs the norm. It's clear from this that there are two main types of European countries. First are those which had a serious epidemic - Spain, Italy, Belgium, France etc. 
In all cases, excess mortality is now back at or nearly back at normal range. In France, it's actually below it - presumably because lockdown means fewer people catching other diseases, car accidents etc.
The second, and more numerous, group are those where the virus never got enough of a grip to really show up in the mortality stats.
The outlier, though, is England (not rest of UK). Here there was the same sharp peak, but it fell back more slowly.
I am emphatically not a public health professional, so any explanation will only be conjecture - prevalence in care homes? Wider spread of the disease due to UK's status as a travel hub? (Yes, most deaths in London but nothing like the concentration in eg Italy.) Lockdown timing?
My personal instinct is 'all of the above, but maybe mostly care homes'. But keen to hear from the experts...
Anyway, please do remember that there is a lag on this - we're talking about deaths a few weeks back not right now. Also, if we are anything like other countries then the line should start to fall much more steeply soon, which is obviously a very good thing.
The statistics from other countries may also not be as robust as ours - as I said, it's not my field. But definitely shows that coronavirus has been more of a challenge in England than elsewhere...
(And on topic of care homes, if you want to understand the pre-existing problems in the sector, you could do worse than reading our report with @DamianGreen... cps.org.uk/research/fixin…)
Oh, one final point - this overall mortality, ie the raw number of dead people. The reason to use this is because it doesn't rely on whether someone wrote the word 'COVID' on a death certificate, and also captures indirect effects eg people not going to hospital for other stuff.
