A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF COVID-19 DATA OF PAKISTAN BY APPLYING BENFORD’S LAW

Abstract

We applied New-comb Benford’s Law to validate the reliability of Covid -19 figures in Pakistan. Official data were taken from March 2020 till November 2020 and the first digit test is applied for the national aggregate dataset of total cases. There are shreds of evidence that the dataset of Pakistan does not conform to the Newcomb Benford’s Law theoretical expectations. The results are robust to the goodness of fit by applying the chi-square test. Although it is appreciating to concern over evidence-based policymaking, we found that the Pakistani epidemiological surveillance system fails to provide trustful data as per New-comb Benford’s Law assumption.