The covid-19 Crisis: A Challenge for Numeric Comparative Law and Governance

In the past weeks, scholars from different disciplines – including myself – have been comparing the publicly available data from different countries about the coronavirus pandemic (covid-19) on a daily basis. For a researcher in comparative law-and-governance, these data are very tempting. Would they allow to draw at least some very raw conclusions about the goodness or badness of some countries’ governance concerning the prevention of covid-19 deaths?1 The more I progressed in this research, the more conscious I became of the dangers lurking in a numeric comparative law2 approach to the covid-19 pandemic. At least three mistakes should be avoided: The first mistake is to focus on the case fatality rate, i.e. the number of covid-19 deaths compared to the number of persons tested positive to the virus in a certain country. For example, one may be tempted to assume that in Germany the governance of the pandemic has been much better than in Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden, just because in Germany the case fatality rate has been (and still is) lower than in the