Detection of pandemics in the early weeks of its starting depends on the case reporting rate and specificity ( Figure 6 ). Our method outperforms the other two by rapidly detecting pandemics in a large fraction of model runs at specificity of 99% and case reporting rate α of 0.5%. It detects pandemics in >50% of total runs within the first 6 weeks of a pandemic starting while the Mov-Avg Cusum and the threshold methods detect pandemics, respectively, in <25% and <35% of total runs (Figure 6a) . The time to detection decreases when the specificity was lowered from 99% to 95% (Figure 6b ). In this case, about 25% and a slightly lower than 50% detection levels were achieved by the WCR method within the first 4 and 5 weeks while the Mov-Avg Cusum and the threshold methods still trailed below the 25% detection level. The same trend was observed when, for the fixed specificity of 99%, the case reporting rate α was raised from 0.5% to 1% (Figure 6c) to 5% (Figure 6e ). At the elevated reporting rates, decrease in specificity further increases the detection level for all methods. But the increase in pandemic detection within the first few weeks of pandemic is more pronounced for our method than the other two (Figs 6d & 6f) .