A full high Street as shoppers are out and about in Berlin as the German economy moves out of partial lockdown from the Corona Virus. Wlimersdorfer Strasse, Charlottenburg. - Craig Stennett for the Telegraph
All eyes have been on Germany this week, amid claims the country is facing a second wave of coronavirus infections because it lifted its lockdown too soon.
But the German government figures cited as evidence of a second wave show nothing of the sort.
Even Dominic Raab got in on the act, telling a Number 10 press conference “Having relaxed restrictions in Germany over the past week, they have seen a rise in the transmission rate of coronavirus”.
The problem, as German government scientists have been at pains to point out, is that it’s simply too early to know anything about the effects of lifting lockdown on transmission rates — because there is no reliable data yet.
The figure that made international headlines this week was a brief rise in the German reproduction number, or R — the number of people each infected person passes the virus on to.
The reproduction number had been falling for weeks, so when it rose above government targets to 1.0 on Monday, it was seized on as evidence of a second wave.
But as Prof Lothar Wieler of Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (RKI) explained this week, the rise didn’t include data on the effects of lifting lockdown. The only reliable data we have is the daily deaths and cases rate:
It takes time for new infections to be fed into the complex calculations that produce the R number.
Infections don’t show up immediately. Most people aren’t tested for the coronavirus until they start to show symptoms, which can take days to appear. Tests take time to process, and there is a further delay before positive results are reported to the authorities.
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