Investigate the possibility of “no status” updates

[dylanneild]

Investigate the possibility of adding a “no status available” update to the standard, thus allowing “no data” indicators. This would let monitoring authorities and labs indicate that there have been issues with sample data collection and/or decisions to skip collection for various reasons.

We presently depend on “no status is no status”, which effectively means that if data isn’t published it’s not available. The problem is that this requires (for example) a day to end before you know for sure that data for that day wasn’t available, and even then late delivery of data for unspecified delays is possible.

An explicit “there will be no data” indicator may be helpful.