14-day notification rate per 100,000 population
The patterns of notification delays illustrated in Figures 1–7 undermine the trustworthiness of 14-day notification rates computed and reported daily. Given that a non-negligible number of cases are notified weeks or months after they occurred, notification rates computed as soon as previous-day data become available are only rough underestimates. The red curve in Figure 8 shows the trend in notification rate that arises by using the data that were available for such computations on each date; the blue curve shows the trend that arises when the most current counts of cases (as published in the latest available report) are used. Discrepancies are large and meaningful over the periods in which notification delays prevailed and spanned weeks or months, particularly between the point at which the first wave started to decline (mid-April 2020) and the point at which the third wave started to rise (mid-December 2020). The discrepancies reappear in mid-December 2021, when notification delays resurface in the midst of a sixth wave with huge daily numbers of cases.