ArticleJournal of public health (Oxford, England)2022
Applying Benford's law to COVID-19 data: the case of the European Union.
Article in Journal of public health (Oxford, England), 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- First-Digit Distributions of Human Long-Bone Morphometric Parameters: An Exploratory X-Ray-Based Comparison with Benford's Law.International journal of general medicine · 2026Article
- Potential COVID-19 test fraud detection: Findings from a pilot study comparing conventional and statistical approaches.Journal of health monitoring · 2024Article
- "Won't get fooled again": statistical fault detection in COVID-19 Latin American data.Globalization and health · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundPrevious studies have used Benford's distribution to assess the accuracy of COVID-19 data. Data inaccuracies provide false information to the media, undermine global response and hinder the preventive measures taken by authorities.
methodsDaily new cases and deaths from all the countries of the European Union were analyzed and the conformance to Benford's distribution was estimated. Two statistical tests and two measures of deviation were calculated to determine whether the reported statistics comply with the expected distribution. Four country-level developmental indexes were included, the GDP per capita, health expenditures, the Universal Health Coverage (UHC) Index and the full vaccination rate. Regression analysis was implemented to examine whether the deviation from Benford's distribution is affected by the aforementioned indexes.
resultsThe findings indicate that Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania and Romania were in line with Benford's distribution. Regarding daily cases, Denmark, Ireland and Greece, showed the greatest deviation from Benford's distribution. Furthermore, it was found that the vaccination rate is positively associated with deviation from Benford's distribution.
conclusionsThe findings suggest that overall, official data provided by authorities are not confirming Benford's law, yet this approach acts as a preliminary tool for data verification. More extensive studies should be made with a more thorough investigation of countries that showed the greatest deviation.
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