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Have these morphed into one now? Is there no longer a distinction between them?
The transitive verb “to reduce” occurs almost universally now as “the numbers have reduced”.

No, they haven’t. They have been reduced.

Tonta, where have you been hiding all of my life?

😂😂

As a lover of all languages I cannot help doing simultaneous translations of anything I hear.
I get quite irritated at our sloppy use of English, much of it so grammatically incorrect that it renders it impossibly difficult for all but keen linguists to translate.
As I often remark - poor English will not translate into perfect French, German etc. Little wonder that foreign languages are disappearing from the curriculum for being “too hard”.

Tonta - I admire your simmering anger regarding ungrammatical usage!

Tonta, I thought your original post was interesting, covering a word, usage I hadn't really thought about. I've just looked online and from the Oxford dictionaries I was given several examples of the usage you don't like -

The number of priority homeless cases has reduced slightly.

Chambers also gives 'verb intransitive' for 'reduce', followed by a definition of 'to become smaller or less'. That seems to validate the 'numbers have reduced' you mentioned.

PS I don't know a great deal about the technicalities of grammar, verbs etc, I just like looking in dictionaries!

I'm afraid I have to disagree with Tonta as I see nothing wrong with that usage. The Oxford English Dictionary gives "the number of cases has reduced" as an example of correct usage and, as malone says, "reduce" can be an intransitive verb; namely, it does not need to take an object.

Having said that, I think it would be better to say simply that the numbers have gone down. Plainer words are always preferable but so often in officialdom people avoid them in order to try to make themselves sound cleverer.

Thanks, Orson. You, like me, seem guided by the ... no, not science, by the dictionaries. I'd never noticed any 'wrong' usage, but I do like hearing other people's thoughts on words, terms etc.

“Guided by the dictionaries” - I like it! I may steal it

Thanks, Jono. Feel free to use it - spreading the word (phrase) is good...