A pitfall in estimating the effective reproductive number Rt for COVID-19

The effective reproductive number Rt of COVID-19 is determined indirectly from data that are only incompletely known (fig. 1). Approaches based on reconstructing these data by sampling time lags from suitable distributions introduce noise effects that can result in distorted estimates of Rt . This, in turn, may lead to misleading interpretations of the efficacy of the various measures taken to limit COVID-19 transmission. We discuss in some detail a study used for real time monitoring of the reproductive number in Switzerland [2]