This work shows that simple compartmental epidemiological models may not reproduce actually reported country-wide statistics since the latter reflects the cumulative amount of infected persons, which in fact is a sum of outbreaks within different patched. It the same time, the multilogistic decomposition of such epidemiological curves reveals components, which are quite close to the solutions of the SIR model in logistic approximations characterised by different sets of parameters including time shifts. This line of reasoning is confirmed by processing data for Spain and Russia in details and, additionally, is illustrated for several other countries. Copyright 2021 Postnikov