In November last year, 1,604,421 pairs of tights were manufactured in Germany, 35,024,281 liters of nectar juice were bottled and 45,302,000 roof tiles were fired.
German athletes recently won 31 medals at the Olympic Winter Games, and fathers' parental leave lasts an average of 3.7 months.
All this and much more is reported, measured and archived in Germany.
But how many people have been vaccinated against Corona and what the current situation in the hospitals is like is not exactly known, even at the end of the second Corona year.
This is scandalous and devastating.
The data gap is scandalous because it affects what are probably the two most important indicators of the pandemic: the vaccination rate and the hospitalization rate.
They are indicators of how violently the virus is raging and which protective measures are proportionate.
The problem with the hospitalization rate is the time lag with which the figures are reported and their imprecision: All corona cases in the hospital are included in the figure, including those that are discovered by chance in patients who are being treated for another reason .
Nationwide figures are missing, in individual federal states it is possible to understand how large the discrepancy is: in the city of Bremen, the hospitalization incidence is 15.9, which triggers the highest warning level.
But two out of three corona patients were not
And the low vaccination rate, the main reason for the corona measures, is also imprecise.
The Robert Koch Institute reports that "at least" 76 percent of the population has been vaccinated once.
A survey has shown that the actual rate is probably higher.
Other countries know better.
They keep vaccination registers or regularly collect representative samples.
"Why don't we have that?" a department head at the Federal Statistical Office asked in an interview.
Yes, actually why not?
Poor data does not automatically mean that politicians are making wrong decisions.
But she makes it unlikely that the right ones will be struck.
It's like a farmer doesn't know if his wheat is dry enough for harvest and he doesn't know weather forecasts.
It may be that he gets on the combine harvester on the right day.
But it can also be that it gives him a bad crop.
The official half-knowledge weakens trust in the Corona policy.
But it is also devastating because the pandemic only shows very drastically how bad the data situation in Germany is overall.
For years, economists have pointed out that they find much richer data treasures abroad.
Good usable information on tax payments and households can be called up easily and under strict data protection regulations in the Nordic countries, but also in France and the Netherlands, for example.
It is no wonder that economists then prefer to base their studies on data from these countries, leaving only limited insights for German economic policy.
"Providing data costs money," researchers stated in the FAZ last summer
They called for monthly household surveys and a research center attached to the Federal Statistical Office.
The researchers have not yet been heard.
Even the Federal Statistical Office itself does not seem to be able to fully exploit its large resources: The rigid Federal Statistics Law prescribes exactly what is to be collected in which context.
Whether this data is actually needed is another matter entirely.
There is no lack of statistics in Germany - tights and roof tiles are well recorded.
There is a lack of flexibility and networking.
A statistician recently said that Germany is not a data desert, there are many oases.
But they are linked far too badly.
Finally, the myth has to be dispelled that data protection concerns on the part of citizens in Germany stand in the way of better data collection.
When the consulting firm BCG asked Germans last year why they didn't use more digital applications that might also collect data, they also mentioned data protection concerns - albeit far behind in 7th place.