A study on the possible merits of using symptomatic cases to trace the development of the COVID-19 pandemic

In a recent work, we introduced a novel method to compute the effective reproduction number [Formula: see text] and we applied it to describe the development of the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy. The study is based on the number of daily positive swabs as reported by the Italian Dipartimento di Protezione Civile. Recently, the Italian Istituto Superiore di Sanità made available the data relative of the symptomatic cases, where the reporting date is the date of beginning of symptoms instead of the date of the reporting of the positive swab. In this paper, we will discuss merits and drawbacks of this data, quantitatively comparing the quality of the pandemic indicators computed with the two samples.