Data-Forensic Determination of the Accuracy of International COVID-19 Reporting: Using Zipf’s Law for Pandemic Investigation

Abstract

Severe outbreaks of infectious disease occur throughout the world with some reaching the level of international pandemic: Coronavirus (COVID-19) is the most recent to do so. In this paper, a mechanism is set out using Zipf's law to establish the accuracy of international reporting of COVID-19 cases via a determination of whether an individual country's COVID-19 reporting follows a power-law for confirmed, recovered, and death cases of COVID-19. The probability of Zipf's law (P-values) for COVID-19 confirmed cases show that Uzbekistan has the highest P-value of 0.940, followed by Belize (0.929), and Qatar (0.897). For COVID-19 recovered cases, Iraq had the highest P-value of 0.901, followed by New Zealand (0.888), and Austria (0.884). Furthermore, for COVID-19 death cases, Bosnia and Herzegovina had the highest P-value of 0.874, followed by Lithuania (0.843), and Morocco (0.825). China, where the COVID-19 pandemic began, is a significant outlier in recording P-values lower than 0.1 for the confirmed, recovered, and death cases. This raises important questions, not only for China, but also any country whose data exhibits P-values below this threshold. The main application of this work is to serve as an early warning for World Health Organization (WHO) and other health regulatory bodies to perform more investigations in countries where COVID-19 datasets deviate significantly from Zipf's law. To this end, this paper provide a tool for illustrating Zipf's law P-values on a global map in order to convey the geographic distribution of reporting anomalies.

Accounting for partisanship and politicization: Employing Benford's Law to examine misreporting of COVID-19 infection cases and deaths in the United States

“…Prior studies investigate the integrity of aggregated COVID-19 reporting data at both the global-level and country-level as well as the state-level of the U.S. (e.g., IHME, 2021 ; Ioraliam, Ho, Tirunagari, & Windridge, 2020 ; Koch & Okamura, 2020 ; Lee, Han, & Jeong, 2020 ; Sambridge & Jackson, 2020 ). However, the counties of the respective individual states in the U.S. hold the primary responsibility for COVID-19 reporting.…”