Focusing Benford’s Law on the Daily Covid-19 Cases Numbers and Daily Covid-19 Deaths Numbers

Benford’s Law has been used to attempt to determine if a list of numbers has been artificially manipulated in any way. Benford’s Law is applicable to many types of lists of numbers and is often used in the accounting domain to flag possible fraud. This paper provides a history of Benford’s Law and presents a number of examples where Benford’s Law applies in the domain of geography, transportation, and economics. The goal of this research, however, is to focus Benford’s Law on the list of numbers representing daily Covid-19 cases and daily Covid-19 deaths. The lists of numbers were analysed with respect to Benford’s Law and graphs were produced comparing the Covid-19 numbers against what was predicted by Benford’s Law. The conclusion of this paper is that at a country level or at a specific date level, the datasets do not have the proper characteristics and Benford’s Law can not be used on those datasets. At a continent level, however, the datasets are much larger and wide ranging. Benford’s Law can be applied to continental datasets.