Inconsistencies in countries COVID-19 data revealed by Benford's law

Abstract

Reporting of daily new cases and deaths on COVID-19 is one of the main tools to understand and menage the pandemic. However, governments and health authorities worldwide present divergent procedures while registering and reporting their data. Most of the bias in those procedures are influenced by economic and political pressures and may lead to intentional or unintentional data corruption, what can mask crucial information. Benford's law is a statistical phenomenon, extensively used to detect data corruption in large data sets. Here, we used the Benford's law to screen and detect inconsistencies in data on daily new cases of COVID-19 reported by 80 countries. Data from 26 countries display severe nonconformity to the Benford's law (p< 0.01), what may suggest data corruption or manipulation.