Abstract
During the spread of SARS-Cov-2, Germany imposed various restrictions,
including an extensive lockdown on 23 March 2020. In this paper, we
point out that the evaluation of the success of such policies depends
critically on data quality. Using reported confirmed cases is apt to
produce misleading results because these data come with unknown variable
lags. Using data on incident cases, i.e., dates of the onset of
symptoms, produces results that are much more reliable.