Benford's Law and COVID-19 Data

Abstract

Marchand and Maahs discuss Benford's Law and COVID-19 data Benford's law was first discovered by Simon Newcomb in his 1881 work in the American Journal of Mathematics When Newcomb used logarithm tables, he noticed how much faster the first pages in the bound tables were wearing out than the last pages Newcomb quantified his observation with a logarithmic law that gives the probability of occurrence for the first significant digit--now known as Benford's law Data sets for COVID-19 tend to be a very good fit for Benford's law They include several categories of daily data from both the US and the world These findings also open up the possibility of Benford's law being used in the future to assess the accuracy of reported sets of COVID-19 data