  The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most pressing issues at present. A
question which is particularly important for governments and policy makers is
the following: Does the virus spread in the same way in different countries? Or
are there significant differences in the development of the epidemic? In this
paper, we devise new inference methods that allow to detect differences in the
development of the COVID-19 epidemic across countries in a statistically
rigorous way. In our empirical study, we use the methods to compare the
outbreak patterns of the epidemic in a number of European countries.
