0000000000314013
AUTHOR
Maria Caballer-tarazona
Benford Law to Monitor COVID-19 Registration Data. Comment on Farhadi, N.; Lahooti, H. Forensic Analysis of COVID-19 Data from 198 Countries Two Years after the Pandemic Outbreak. COVID 2022, 2, 472-484
In a recent study published in COVID by Farhadi & Lahooti, 2022 [1], the authors claim that the work carried out by Morillas-Jurado et al., 2022 [2] is an example of a poor application of Benford Law (BL) in the context of pandemic. Morillas-Jurado et al., 2022 examined the COVID-19 epidemic specifically during the first wave of the pandemic and document anomalies in the data that occurred in six Spanish regions. The main argument to Farhadi & Lahooti's criticism is that the regional data sets were too small to assess the conformity of COVID-19 data to BL.
Applying Benford’s Law to Monitor Death Registration Data: A Management Tool for the COVID-19 Pandemic
In Spain, the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the various regions of the country differ7 ently. The availability of reliable and up-to-date information has proved to be fundamental for the 8 management of this health crisis. However, especially during the first wave of the pandemic (Feb9 ruary-August 2020), the disparity in the recording criteria and in the timing of providing these fig10 ures to the central government created controversy and confusion regarding the real dimension of 11 the pandemic. It is therefore necessary to have objective and homogeneous criteria at the national 12 level to guide health managers in the correct recording and evaluation of the magnitude of the pan13 demic…