Covid Cases and Covid Deaths as seen through Benford's Law – With a Special View to Africa

Benford's Law is often used to indicate if there is a possibility that data (lists of numbers) has been artificially manipulated. This paper looks at using Benford analysis on data published with respect to daily Covid-19 infections and daily Covid-19 deaths. Specifically, data relating to Africa was analysed. This included world wide data, African data, and data for the South African Development Community. At the time of writing this paper, there was not enough measurements at individual country level in order to analyse those numbers usig Benford's Law. The data sources were publicly available and free to use. In order to encourage reproducibility, the data sources are documented and the compute environment used for this research is also documented.