Incidence, hospitalization rate, R value, excess mortality - there never seemed to be a lack of numbers and possible indicators of how the country and its population were doing throughout the entire corona pandemic.

Falk Heunemann

Business editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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And also not in attempts to present them clearly and understandably: The Hessian Ministry of Health, for example, published a daily bulletin with various key figures over a period of months, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) created an overview page on the Internet, on which the most important values ​​for each federal state and each district are presented in a comparable manner.

At the same time, there was a need for new data that could not previously be collected.

For example, the Federal Statistical Office is experimenting with geodata from millions of cell phones in order to show in real time how many people are currently on the road, on rails and in the air - for example during the lockdown and afterwards.

But the daily flood of this data triggered more questions than it answered.

How meaningful is an incidence value if not all infections are reported?

How quickly does the data actually get to the authorities?

Or: How credible is the information about the deaths?

According to the official information, almost 12,000 infected Hessians died in the three years of the pandemic.

The RKI records all the deceased in whom a laboratory test has shown an infection.

Whether they died from the virus itself or from other diseases is "often difficult to decide in practice," according to the federal institute.

However, a study with 1129 autopsies showed that 86 percent of those infected died of Covid-19 themselves, so the infection was not just a side effect for them.

On the other hand, the RKI even assumes that the official number of corona deaths is too low, because many of those who died were not tested for the virus.

But such classifications were often ignored by critics.

In addition, the data is not available as quickly as would be desirable in a rapidly developing emergency.

In the beginning, this was simply due to the technology and inconsistent forms, but also because medical and scientific examinations take their time.

For politicians, this meant that they had to repeatedly make decisions about encroachments on liberty to avert danger without knowing exactly the current situation – and hope that the numbers would prove them right afterwards.

However, she did not have a comparison of what the numbers would have looked like without the restrictions.