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We are grateful for the interest expressed by Dr Finsterer and co-authors in our article. First, we want to emphasize that the study described is an epidemiological one – attempting to describe the incidence of epilepsy among those infected compared to an age-and sex-matched population sample in the years preceding the pandemic. The outcome was occurrence of a G40 ICD code: a validated administrative definition of epilepsy [1]. Indeed, the specificity increases if the ICD-10 code is combined with a prescription of an antiseizure medication [2] but the incidence of epilepsy in the control group is at the expected level, suggesting that the method has worked adequately.