Monitoring the return to normality in six European countries III: data problems continue, progress slow-walks

Abstract

It seems that, with a milder behaviour of the epidemic, and a generalised perception that things are getting better, governments in all six countries at stake -Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain- have decided to look closer at their statistics. That ‘new daily cases’ was greatly underreported is widely known, so the peaks and troughs that suddenly started to appear, though understandable and largely due to the encompassing testing policy that has (finally) been implemented, jeopardise analyses that have been using this statistic. Even so, the filtering process we’ve adopted succeeds, to some extent, to attenuate the negative outcomes revisions including new entrants -due to the testing results- have introduced in the series.