Abstract
Each country has been racing to contain the spread of COVID-19. The published data of daily infection and death cases can be used to measure the effectiveness of the control interventions. We focus our study in two Southeast Asia countries: Indonesia and Malaysia during period between March and November 2020. Newcomb-Benford law has been commonly used to analyze the probabilities of the first significant digits in natural occurrences since the late 19th century. It is a prominent statistical tool for its capability to detect frauds in datasets. A chi-squared test was recruited to quantify the closeness of the data and Newcomb-Benford law distributions. The results revealed that the distributions of daily infection and death cases in Indonesia followed Newcomb-Benford law while the opposite results were obtained for Malaysia. We have done the analysis of verifying the daily COVID-19 infection and death cases in Indonesia and Malaysia using Newcomb-Benford law. It can be inferred that, between March and November 2020, the control interventions in Indonesia was less effective compared to Malaysia.
Highlights
Corona Virus Disease-19 (COVID-19), which has caused an outbreak since December 2019, has infected over 59 million people and led to more than 1.2 million deaths by November 2020 [1]
It can be inferred that, between March and November 2020, the control interventions in Indonesia were less effective compared to Malaysia
The null hypothesis claims that both distributions are equal while the alternative hypothesis ( ) indicates a non-conformity due to the independence of observed distribution. It implies that both distributions of daily infection and death cases for Indonesia significantly followed NBL while those for Malaysia were statistically different from NBL
Summary
Corona Virus Disease-19 (COVID-19), which has caused an outbreak since December 2019, has infected over 59 million people and led to more than 1.2 million deaths by November 2020 [1]. Every country in the world was racing to contain the spread of the virus by executing some control interventions to “flatten the curve” of COVID-19 infections. The Government of Malaysia imposed movement control order (MCO), targeted screening, and released three stimulus packages [4], [6]. To monitor the effectiveness of the control interventions, both Government authorities published the number of COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths on daily basis. There occurred at least three problems for Government in measuring the effectiveness of
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