Flaxman et al. (Nature, 8 June 2020, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2405-7, 2020) infer that non-pharmaceutical interventions conducted by several European countries considerably reduced effective reproduction numbers and saved millions of lives. We show that their method is ill-conceived and that the alleged effects are artefacts. Moreover, we demonstrate that the United Kingdom?s lockdown was both superfluous and ineffective.

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.