ArticleScientific reports2021
Using the Newcomb-Benford law to study the association between a country's COVID-19 reporting accuracy and its development.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Red flags in global autism data: a forensic analysis of prevalence patterns and official aid dependencies.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Legislative incapacity and underreporting of COVID-19 mortality.Preventive medicine reports · 2024Article
- Analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic using a compartmental model with time-varying parameters fitted by a genetic algorithm.Expert systems with applications · 2023Article
- "Won't get fooled again": statistical fault detection in COVID-19 Latin American data.Globalization and health · 2022Article
- Applying Benford's law to COVID-19 data: the case of the European Union.Journal of public health (Oxford, England) · 2022Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred controversies related to whether countries manipulate reported data for political gains. We study the association between accuracy of reported COVID-19 data and developmental indicators. We use the Newcomb-Benford law (NBL) to gauge data accuracy. We run an OLS regression of an index constructed from developmental indicators (democracy level, gross domestic product per capita, healthcare expenditures, and universal healthcare coverage) on goodness-of-fit measures to the NBL. We find that countries with higher values of the developmental index are less likely to deviate from the Newcomb-Benford law. The relationship holds for the cumulative number of reported deaths and total cases but is more pronounced for the death toll. The findings are robust for second-digit tests and for a sub-sample of countries with regional data. The NBL provides a first screening for potential data manipulation during pandemics. Our study indicates that data from autocratic regimes and less developed countries should be treated with more caution. The paper further highlights the importance of independent surveillance data verification projects.
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