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