| Summary: | We present a less common type of discussion about COVID-19 data, beginning with the observation that the number of people reported <i>deceased</i> following COVID-19 infection is currently the most reliable dataset to be used. When the available real-life data are visualized for a number of European countries, they reveal the commonly seen exponential increase, though with different absolute rates, and over time different periods. More interesting information is obtained upon inspection of the daily increments in deaths. These curves look very similar to those for China, and seem to indicate that in European countries that have imposed more strict human–human contact measures, in particular Italy and Spain, where we have seen a decrease in daily deaths since early April, it is to be expected it will take 40–50 days from the end of March until this number has fallen to negligible levels. Taking the initial increase in the number of deaths for Germany, and combining this with typical values for the mortality reported in the literature and the published number of daily contacts for the working population, we calculated an initial increase in infections of 20 per day by a single infected person with an average human–human contact number of 22, decreasing to 5.5 after the first 10 days. The high number at the outset is likely related to outbreaks in a high local concentration of people.
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