ArticleGlobalization and health2022
"Won't get fooled again": statistical fault detection in COVID-19 Latin American data.
Article in Globalization and health, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- "The COVID-19 pandemic in BRICS: Milestones, interventions, and molecular epidemiology".PLOS global public health · 2024Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
backgroundClaims of inconsistency in epidemiological data have emerged for both developed and developing countries during the COVID-19 pandemic.
methodsIn this paper, we apply first-digit Newcomb-Benford Law (NBL) and Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KLD) to evaluate COVID-19 records reliability in all 20 Latin American countries. We replicate country-level aggregate information from Our World in Data.
resultsWe find that official reports do not follow NBL's theoretical expectations (n = 978; chi-square = 78.95; KS = 4.33, MD = 2.18; mantissa = .54; MAD = .02; DF = 12.75). KLD estimates indicate high divergence among countries, including some outliers.
conclusionsThis paper provides evidence that recorded COVID-19 cases in Latin America do not conform overall to NBL, which is a useful tool for detecting data manipulation. Our study suggests that further investigations should be made into surveillance systems that exhibit higher deviation from the theoretical distribution and divergence from other similar countries.
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