ArticlePhysica A2020
COVID-19, flattening the curve, and Benford's law.
Article in Physica A, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- COVID-19: did the masks work?Future microbiology · 2024Article
- Investigating and preventing scientific misconduct using Benford's Law.Research integrity and peer review · 2023Article
- Multi-scale causality analysis between COVID-19 cases and mobility level using ensemble empirical mode decomposition and causal decomposition.Physica A · 2022Article
- Applying Benford's law to COVID-19 data: the case of the European Union.Journal of public health (Oxford, England) · 2022Article
- Population density impact on COVID-19 mortality rate: A multifractal analysis using French data.Physica A · 2022Article
- The Effect of Socio-Demographic Factors in Health-Seeking Behaviors among Bangladeshi Residents during the First Wave of COVID-19.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- The day after tomorrow: financial repercussions of COVID-19 on systemic risk.Review of evolutionary political economy · 2022Article
- Modeling and forecasting the COVID-19 pandemic with heterogeneous autoregression approaches: South Korea.Results in physics · 2021Article
- Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown impacts: A description in a longitudinal study of bipolar disorder.Journal of affective disorders · 2021Article
- Article
- SEIRD model to study the asymptomatic growth during COVID-19 pandemic in India.Indian journal of physics and proceedings of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (2004) · 2021Article
- Dynamical SPQEIR model assesses the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19 epidemic outbreaks.PloS one · 2021Article
- Gravitational scaling analysis on spatial diffusion of COVID-19 in Hubei Province, China.PloS one · 2021Article
- Benford's law and metabolomics: A tale of numbers and blood.Transfusion and apheresis science : official journal of the World Apheresis Association : official journal of the European Society for Haemapheresis · 2020Review
- Benchmarking of public health surveillance of COVID-19 in Colombia: First semesterBiomedica : revista del Instituto Nacional de Salud · 2020Article
- Benchmarking of public health surveillance of COVID-19 in Colombia: First semesterBiomedica : revista del Instituto Nacional de Salud · 2020Article
- Can we rely on COVID-19 data? An assessment of data from over 200 countries worldwide.Science progressArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
For many countries attempting to control the fast-rising number of coronavirus cases and deaths, the race is on to "flatten the curve," since the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has taken on pandemic proportions. In the absence of significant control interventions, the curve could be steep, with the number of COVID-19 cases growing exponentially. In fact, this level of proliferation may already be happening, since the number of patients infected in Italy closely follows an exponential trend. Thus, we propose a test. When the numbers are taken from an exponential distribution, it has been demonstrated that they automatically follow Benford's Law (BL). As a result, if the current control interventions are successful and we flatten the curve (i.e., we slow the rate below an exponential growth rate), then the number of infections or deaths will
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.