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Abstract

Benford’s Law is applied as a method to analyze and find data manipulation in large datasets. It is consistently recognized as a valid method to combat financial fraud and tax evasion. Here, we studied its application to datasets of COVID-19, targeting data manipulation in the following: total confirmed cases, daily confirmed cases, total confirmed deaths, daily confirmed deaths. We considered countries among the most total confirmed cases on the day 1 September 2020 and China. General results showed that COVID-19’s numbers do follow Benford’s Law. Moreover, no evidence of data manipulation is seen for data from the USA, Brazil, India, Peru, South Africa, Colombia, Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Chile, the United Kingdom, France, Saudi Arabia, China, Philippines, Belgium, Pakistan, and Italy. Results suggest a high possibility of data manipulations for Russia’s data. A small divergence is present in Iran’s numbers.
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Is COVID-19 data reliable? A statistical analysis with Benford’s Law
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Anran Wei, Andre E. Vellwock
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Abstract
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Benford’s Law is applied as a method to analyze and find data manipulation in large
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datasets. It is consistently recognized as a valid method to combat financial fraud and tax
6
evasion. Here, we studied its application to datasets of COVID-19, targeting data
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manipulation in the following: total confirmed cases, daily confirmed cases, total
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confirmed deaths, daily confirmed deaths. We considered countries among the most total
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confirmed cases on the day 1 September 2020 and China. General results showed that
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COVID-19’s numbers do follow Benford’s Law. Moreover, no evidence of data
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manipulation is seen for data from the USA, Brazil, India, Peru, South Africa, Colombia,
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Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Chile, the United Kingdom, France, Saudi Arabia, China,
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Philippines, Belgium, Pakistan, and Italy. Results suggest a high possibility of data
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manipulations for Russia’s data. A small divergence is present in Iran’s numbers.
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Keywords: COVID-19, Benford’s Law, statistics, coronavirus, data manipulation, data
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analysis
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1. Introduction
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Benford’s Law, also called the NewcombBenford Law, was firstly observed by
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Newcomb (1) and popularized by Benford (2). The Law is widely applied to test the
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authenticity of data in various fields of our daily life. Most of them are intended for
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financial applications (3), accounting fraud (4-6), and politics (3, 7-10). Benford’s Law
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points out that the first digit of a naturally occurring decimal number is more likely to be
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equal to 1, and the possibilities of the first digit to be equal to the subsequent numbers,
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i.e., 2 ~ 9, decrease progressively. With strong evidence that common diseases numbers
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indeed follow Benford’s distribution (11), studies have attempted to analyze COVID-19
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Benfordness, namely, how well their numbers fit Benford’s Law. From here on, we are
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going to mention the date when each study was made or published, since COVID-19
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numbers may change over time. Sambridge and Jackson (12) studied data until 9 April
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2020 and suggested that data from the United States, Japan, Indonesia, and most European
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countries follow well the distribution, but also suggested anomalies. The authors
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illustrated that data for total death in the Czech Republic completely does not follow
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Benford’s Law, specifically it has a high peak at the “9” that is contrary to the distribution.
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Despite proving that COVID-19 follows Benford’s Law, they also confirmed that the
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timeline in which the datasets are evaluated is crucial. Exemplifying, after the virus
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growth is reduce and daily confirmed cases flattens out if the cases are already in the
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thousands the first digit unquestionably tends to become constant. The same consideration
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was seen by Lee, Han (13) in a paper submitted on 28 April 2020. Koch and Okamura
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(14), on 28 April 2020, demonstrated that the USA’s, Italy’s and China’s COVID’s
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confirmed cases numbers match the Law, showing high Benfordness and no data
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manipulation for these countries. Idrovo and Manrique-Hernández (15), with data up to
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15 March 2020, likewise proved no data manipulation on China’s numbers. In the same
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timeline, checking confirmed cases data until 30 April 2020, Raul (16) indicated that Italy,
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Portugal, Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Belgium and Chile may have
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altered COVID data, among a large study of 23 countries. All these studies proved that
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COVID can be viewed in the Benford’s Law perspective, but also the conclusions are
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somewhat contradictory regarding which country has possible data manipulation.
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2. Methods
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2.1 Benford’s Law and d* factor
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Benford’s Law can be inadequately explained based on an intuition that the mantissa of
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logarithms of exponentially growing numbers tends to be uniformly distributed. For an
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arbitrary decimal number , its logarithm can be written in the form as
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 󰇛󰇜  󰇛 󰇜
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where is the integer part and  is the mantissa of the logarithm of . It is obvious
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that the first digit of can be identified by the log-mantissa  . For numbers with
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first digit equal to , the corresponding log-mantissa is located at the domain of
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[ 󰇛󰇜). Considering the hypothesis of uniform distribution of log-
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mantissa, the probability of the first digit to be equal to is thus given by
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3
󰇛󰇜󰇛 󰇜 
󰇛 󰇜
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Here, we list the probability distribution for each number from 1 to 9 to be the first digit
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according to Benford’s Law, as shown in Table 1.
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Table 1. First digit distribution according to the Benford’s Law.
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d
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
P(d)
30.1%
17.6%
12.5%
9.7%
7.9%
6.7%
5.8%
5.1%
4.6%
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In our study, deviations to Benford’s curve were quantified by the d*-factor (d*) (3, 17)
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that is fundamentally the Euclidian distance between the country numbers and Benford’s
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distribution, after normalizing it by the maximum possible distance, 1.03606, the situation
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when there is only a peak at 9 and zero for other first digits (17). If a dataset matches
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exactly the Benford’s curve, d* is equal to 0.0. A higher Euclidian distance results in a
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lower Benfordness, thus, d* is closer to 1.0. Goodman (17) proposed that a d* higher than
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0.25 is high evidence of data manipulation. The calculation of d* is expressed as
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󰇡
󰇛󰇜󰇛󰇜󰇢
 
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where is the first digit from 1 to 9, and
󰇛󰇜 stands for the probability distribution of
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each first digit in real datasets.
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2.2 Data collection and preprocessing
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Data were obtained on 1 September 2020 in the COVID-19 Data Repository by the Center
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for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (18). It was
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considered countries among the highest total cases, thus the USA, Brazil, India, Russia,
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Peru, South Africa, Colombia, Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Chile, Iran, the United
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Kingdom, France, Saudi Arabia, Philippines, Belgium, Pakistan, Italy. China was
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included as it was the initial country with a boost in confirmed cases. Except for the USA,
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the UK, France and China, the imported data already presents the country results per day
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for total confirmed cases, daily confirmed cases, total deaths and daily deaths. For the
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USA, the UK and France, data is divided into regions (provinces or cities), thus we
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summed to achieve the country data per day. As cases of China quickly increased and
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stabilized in a matter of days, the datasets of China are relatively small and thus not
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adequate for applying the Benford’s Law. Here, the data of China was preprocessed in a
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different way, which was not summed to have the country’s data per day, but left as
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provinces’ data per day, increasing the dataset and allowing us to test its Benfordness.
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Then, the first digits of these data for overall countries or provinces are recorded to obtain
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following probability distributions.
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3. Results and discussions
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Results will be addressed in sections regarding data of the whole world and the other
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selected countries. Figures 1-4 illustrates the results and the data comparisons for the
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whole world and each country to the Benford’s Law distribution (line in black). Figure 1
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and Figure 2 shows the total confirmed cases and daily confirmed cases, respectively.
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Meanwhile, Figure 3 and Figure 4 shows the total death number and the daily death
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number accordingly.
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3.1 World
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The d* values of the whole world data were below 0.10 (Figures 1a, 2a, 3a, 4a). Moreover,
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daily cases and total deaths were below 0.03 (Figures 2a, 3a). These results validate the
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use of Benford’s Law for the COVID-19 data, in all the four characteristics here studied.
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3.2 USA
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The USA is an ideal country to analyze the numbers, as it has consistent daily cases, thus
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a large database. A small variation in the daily cases is seen in Figure 2b, with a slightly
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larger peak at “2”. However, this is unseen in the total cases (Figure 1b). Figure 3b shows
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an extremely large peak at “1” and a high d*. Nevertheless, this occurs due to the total
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death numbers reaching more than 100 thousand, keeping the first digit “1” for a long
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time. The daily death cases validate the hypothesis, by showing a good correlation with
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the Benford’s Law. This raises the attention to the need to analyze if the alterations of
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data are normal or not before drawing final conclusions.
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3.3 Brazil
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Brazil is another case of high Benfordness. However, a small variation can be seen in the
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daily death number, with a d* of 0.21. This is due to daily deaths higher than 1,000 and
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below 1,999, especially in the last weeks of the studied data.
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3.4 India
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There are no indications of data alteration for the India numbers (Figures 1d, 2d, 3d, 4d),
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with a maximum d* of 0.15 and good Benfordness.
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3.5 Russia
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Results suggest high possibility of data manipulations for Russia’s data. Figure 1e
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illustrates the lack of Benfordness for the total confirmed cases. The pattern resembles a
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random distribution: if we calculate the d* related to a constant probability of 1/9 for all
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first digits, it shows that the d* is 0.13, a value lower than the one related to the Benford
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distribution (0.20). Daily cases (Figure 2e) reconfirms the lack correlation to the
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Benford’s Law, with a d* of 0.30 and no apparent large peak, leading to the conclusion
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that the high d* is not due to a constant first digit as seen in the USA and Brazil but most
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probably data alteration. Death numbers are also off, the high fraction of “1” in the total
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deaths (Figure 3e) is explained by reaching 10,000 plus cases. However, the almost equal
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fractions of the others' first digits, “2” to “9”, suggests a constant growth of the total
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deaths. This behavior is not exhibited in the other countries. Daily deaths (Figure 4e) also
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do not follow Benford’s Law.
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3.6 Peru
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Total confirmed and death cases have a good correlation to Benford’s curve (Figures 1f
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and 3f). A small deviation is shown in Figures 2e and 4e, but the latter can be explained
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to a more frequent daily death rate between 100 and 199, in agreement to the country size
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and its currently COVID-19 situation.
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3.7 South Africa
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There are no indications of data alteration for the South Africa’s numbers (Figures 1g, 2g,
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3g, 4g), with a maximum d* of 0.10 and good Benfordness.
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3.8 Colombia
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There are no indications of data alteration for the Colombia’s numbers (Figures 1h, 2h,
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3h, 4h), with a maximum d* of 0.12. Extreme low values of d* are seen for the confirmed
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cases, both total and daily.
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3.9 Mexico
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There are no indications of data alteration for the Mexico’s numbers (Figures 1i, 2i, 3i,
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4i), with a maximum d* of 0.17.
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3.10 Spain
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Spain’s numbers might give a wrong indication, with d* higher than 0.45 for total cases
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and total deaths. Nevertheless, this is due to the reduction of transmission and deaths as
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well as a consequent constancy of the first digit. The total confirmed cases stabilized
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around 200,000 cases and the total deaths around 20,000. Naturally, peaks at “2” are
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present in Figures 1j and 3j. The lack of data manipulation is confirmed by a low d* in
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daily confirmed cases (Figure 2j) and daily deaths (Figure 4j).
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3.11 Argentina
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Argentina is one of the countries with the most agreement with Benford’s distribution,
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showing no evidence of data manipulation. A maximum d* of 0.09 seen for the daily
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death cases.
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3.12 Chile
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Chile has a small deviation only in the total confirmed cases (Figure 1l). However, the
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same does not occur for the other data (Figures 2l, 3l, 4l). The alteration in Figure 1l can
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be explained by the decrease of confirmed cases after Chile reached 100 thousand,
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growing the decline rate until the cases were around 300,000. Thus, there is no
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confirmation of data manipulation.
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3.13 Iran
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Iran’s daily confirmed cases have a peak at “2” (Figure 2m), resulting in a d* of 0.42,
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which cannot be explained. Nevertheless, the total confirmed cases correctly follow
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Benford’s distribution (Figure 1m). The other data is partially in agreement with
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Benford’s (Figures 3m and 4m), with an odd peak at “1” for daily death (Figure 4m)
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3.14 United Kingdom
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The United Kingdom curves have high d* values for total confirmed cases and deaths
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(Figures 1n and 3n), while low d* for daily cases and deaths (Figures 2n and 4n). The
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high values are due to the flattening of the curve and the slowing down of the growing of
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confirmed cases and deaths in the last weeks. Benfordness in Figures 2n and 4n validates
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the data.
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3.15 France
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France’s numbers are like United Kingdom’s, with a low Benfordness of total numbers
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(Figures 1o and 3o) keeping a high Benfordness of daily numbers (Figures 2o and 4o).
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Regarding total confirmed cases, a peak at “1” is seen, due to the flattening around
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100,000 to 199,999 (Figure 3o). In conclusion, the results for France are valid, without
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any apparent manipulation.
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3.16 Saudi Arabia
200
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Saudi Arabia’s shows good Benfordness for total confirmed cases, daily confirmed cases,
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and total deaths (Figures 1p, 2p, 3p). Instead, daily deaths do not follow Benford’s curve,
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with a 102.9% curve.
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3.17 China
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China’s numbers show great Benfordness, especially for total and daily confirmed cases,
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and total deaths (Figures 1q, 2q, 3q). A higher d* is seen for daily deaths, with a peak at
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“1”. This is explained as the data considers provinces and cities, and not the full summed
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country as the other countries in our study. The Hubei province in China is the one mainly
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affected by the virus, presenting daily deaths consistently higher than 10, while other
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provinces showed frequently single daily deaths, thus creating the peak at “1”.
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3.18 Philippines
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There are no indications of data alteration for the Philippines’s numbers (Figures 1r, 2r,
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3r, 4r), with a maximum d* of 0.18.
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3.19 Belgium
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Belgium has good Benfordness for confirmed cases, total and daily (Figures 1s and 2s).
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A high peak at “9” for total deaths is due to the flattening of deaths between 9,000 and
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9,999, and the d* of 0.06 for daily deaths reaffirms the lack of data manipulation.
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3.20 Pakistan
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Pakistan shows great Benfordness for all data (Figures 1t, 2t, 3t, 4t), with a maximum d*
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of 0.28.
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3.21 Italy
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9
Italy’s numbers show peaks at “2” and “3” for total confirmed cases and total deaths,
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respectively. These are due to the recent decrease infection in the country. Daily data have
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high Benfordness, with maximum d* of 0.12.
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4. Conclusions
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The application of the Benford’s Law to assess COVID-19 data was confirmed. It
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presented a valid method to measure variations on countries’ datasets and suggested
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possible data manipulations. Our analysis suggested a high possibility of manipulation
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on Russia’s COVID-19 numbers, for all the data: total and daily confirmed cases and
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deaths. Small deviations were also seen for Iran’s daily confirmed cases and daily deaths.
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No data manipulation is shown for data from the USA, Brazil, India, Peru, South Africa,
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Colombia, Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Chile, the United Kingdom, France, Saudi Arabia,
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China, Philippines, Belgium, Pakistan, and Italy.
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Figure 1. Total confirmed cases for (a) the whole world and (b-u) selected countries. The
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black curve refers to Benford's Law probability.
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Figure 2. Daily confirmed cases for (a) the whole world and (b-u) selected countries. The
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black curve refers to Benford's Law probability.
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Figure 3. Total deaths for (a) the whole world and (b-u) selected countries. The black
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curve refers to Benford's Law probability.
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Figure 4. Daily deaths for (a) the whole world and (b-u) selected countries. The black line
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refers to Benford's Law probability.
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... previous studies (Wei and Vellwock 2020). The distribution of data was more similar to a uniform distribution instead of be the result with forensic techniques like NBL. ...
... By making use of one goodness-of-fit test, they found conformity to NBL the United States, Brazil, India, Peru, South Africa, Colombia, Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Chile, the United Kingdom, France, Saudi Arabia, China, the Philippines, Belgium, Pakistan, and Italy. There were some deviations that were explainable e.g., for Spain, the reduction of transmission and deaths where the total cases and deaths were stabilized at a level(Wei and Vellwock 2020). In their paper, the deviation is generally attributed to the flattening of the curve. ...
Thesis
Full-text available
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the need for transparent and accurate data reporting and the importance of efficient institutional responses from authorities worldwide. Researchers challenged the legitimacy of the reported data and the competency of relevant authorities to handle the pandemic successfully. This paper aims to use Newcomb-inconsistencies in data by testing the first-distribution, on the reported daily COVID-19 cases from 150 countries. The NBL suggests that the frequencies of first-digits in randomly selected and naturally occurring numbers follows a logarithmic distribution where the expected frequency of digit 1 is 30.1%, of digit 2 is 17.6%, and so on until the digit 9 is observed only 4.6% of the time. Hence, when there is nonconformity, this suggests an abnormality in the data to be investigated further for manipulation, miscalculation, and a change in the nature of the data in hand. As an addition to prior research on the matter, this paper will be adopting a more holistic approach and will be specifically looking for correlations between certain institutional characteristics and conformity to NBL. The hypothesis of the paper is that the conformity of COVID-19 daily cases to NBL is correlated with economic, demographic, and socio-political factors of the countries, and that nonconformity does not necessarily suggest intentional misreporting. In the analysis, the countries are grouped based on their level of conformity and their correlation with these three groups of factors are examined. The results show that wealthier, less-19 data conform better to NBL. The we detect and measure the number of cases or having a higher income before the pandemic population and higher total number of cases might have exceeded the capacity of the health system and made monitoring harder to maintain. Lastly, more democratic states having better conformity is most likely due to more transparent policies from authorities and less political concerns related to crisis control.
... However, such a rule of thumb has been shown to be statistically unfounded in Campanelli (2021) and, generally, gives untrustworthy results for a number of data points either much less or much bigger than 40 (in particular the rule has a very low statistical power for a number of data points N ≫ 40.) In fact, in Wei and Vellwock (2020), cumulative cases for Italy, Spain, and U.K. gave high d * scores (0.50, 0.45, and 0.32, respectively), while our result is that conformance to Benford's law for these countries cannot be rejected at a significant level of 0.05. Moreover, while our analysis reject the null at a significant level less than 0.01 for Russia, Philippines, and South Africa, Wei and Vellwock found full conformance to Benford's law, the d * values for these countries being well below 0.25 (0.20, 0.11, and 0.10, respectively). ...
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Using the Euclidean distance statistical test of Benford’s law, we analyse the COVID-19 weekly case counts by country. While 62% of the 100 countries and territories considered in the present study conforms to Benford’s law at a significant level of α = 0.05 and 17% at a significant level of 0.01 ≤ α < 0.05, the remaining 21% shows a deviation from it (p values smaller than 0.01). In particular, 5% of the countries ‘break’ Benford’s law with a p value smaller than 0.001.
... Research conducted by Anran Wei et al. in September 2020 studied the application of Benford's Law to COVID-19 datasets where they targeted data readings of total confirmed cases, total deaths, and daily confirmed cases. They obtained numbers from nineteen countries and the general results showed that COVID-19 data readings follow Benford's Law [8]. The idea behind Benford's Law is that the leading digits 1, 2, . . . ...
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... W odniesieniu do liczby zgonów trzeba odnotować, że autorzy niniejszej pracy dysponowali jedynym dostępnym w Polsce źródłem, jakim jest formalny rejestr zgonów z powodu COVID-19 w czasie pandemii. Nie ma zatem w tym przypadku możliwości krytycznego odniesienia się do wiarygodności rozpoznań przyczyn zgonów, ale nie jest to problem charakteryzujący wyłącznie sytuację w Polsce w przebiegu pandemii COVID-19 [12,13]. Z kolei liczba zakażeń została oszacowana na podstawie badania odpowiednio dużej próby, reprezentatywnej w zakresie rozkładu wieku i płci. ...
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Background: During the course of COVID-19 pandemic, a wide range of scientific projects was implemented worldwide, including studies focusing on Infection Fatality Rate (IFR). The value of IFR depends on the number of COVID-19 deaths in a population in a given period and the number of infected people in this population, usually provided by seropepidemiological studies (anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG in the case of COVID-19). The objective of our study was to estimate IFR in the course of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, in the general population of Upper Silesia Metropolitan Area (USMA). Material and methods: The seroepidemiological study was conducted in October - November 2020. Among randomly selected inhabitants of Katowice, Gliwice, and Sosnowiec (1167 people), the presence of SARS-CoV-2 virus infection was assessed based on a positive IgG test result performed with the ELISA method. Data on deaths due to COVID-19 were obtained from the Registry Offices of each city. The Infection Fatality Rate was calculated using the formula IFR (%) = [number of deaths/number of infected] × 100. Results: Results of our study showed the prevalence of infection at 11.4% (95% CI: 9.5-13.2). In three examined towns, in the period January-November 2020, there was a total of 516 COVID-19 deaths. The resulting crude IFR was 0.65% (95% CI: 0.56-0.78). The IgG test had 88% sensitivity and 99% specificity and these figures were used to adjust IFR. The adjusted IFR value was similar to the crude value: IFR = 0.62% (95% CI: 0.53-0.74). Conclusions: The value of IFR estimated for the USMA population was similar to average values obtained in other countries and can be used as the background for monitoring the course and impact of COVID-19 pandemic in the Upper Silesian Industrial Area. Med Pr. 2021;72(6).
... Benford's law (Benford 1938) has been advocated as a simple, (arguably) effective method for auditors to not only identify discrepancies in data, but to uncover potential data manipulation in financial statements (Durtschi, Hillison, and Pacini 2004), ERP systems (Ma'arif et al. 2020), or official information released by authorities (Wei and Vellwock 2020). Simply put, Benford's law states that in many naturally occurring collections of numbers the leading digit is likely to be small. ...
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The impact of statistical methods on the audit practice is growing because of the increasing availability of audit data and the statistical methods to analyze these data. A key aspect in the statistical approach to auditing is assessing the strength of evidence for or against a hypothesis. Unfortunately, the often-used frequentist statistical methods cannot provide the statistical evidence that audit standards demand directly nor easily. In this article we discuss an alternative approach that can provide this evidence: Bayesian inference. Firstly, we explore the philosophical differences between frequentist and Bayesian inference. Secondly, we discuss misconceptions in the interpretation of frequentist statistical evidence, and finally we discuss how Bayesian inference allows the auditor to obtain and interpret statistical evidence in line with audit standards via its alternative to the p value, the Bayes factor.
... The reliability of COVID-19 was studied by [12], which also used Benford Law to the total number, new cases and deaths in Russia and found a high possibility of incorrecteness manipulation on reported numbers. In their report [13] found for European countries such as: France, Germany, Spain, UK, Switzerland and Italy that records of cumulative infections and deaths fitted well to the BL and show consistent reporting. ...
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