Related papers: Authoritarian Governments Appear to Manipulate COV…
We use the Newcomb-Benford law to test if countries have manipulated reported data during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that democratic countries, countries with the higher gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, higher healthcare…
Background: A major question in Covid-19 research is whether democracies handled the Covid-19 pandemic crisis better or worse than authoritarian countries. However, it is important to consider the issues of democracy versus…
We study how available data on COVID-19 cases and deaths in different countries are reliable. Our analysis is based on a modification of the law of anomalous numbers, the Newcomb-Benford law, applied to the daily number of deaths and new…
The difference in COVID 19 death rates across political regimes has caught a lot of attention. The "efficient autocracy" view suggests that autocracies may be more efficient at putting in place policies that contain COVID 19 spread. On the…
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, both voluntary changes in behavior and administrative restrictions on human interactions have occurred. These actions are intended to reduce the transmission rate of the severe acute respiratory…
Are COVID-19 fatalities large when a federal government does not enforce containment policies and instead allow states to implement their own policies? We answer this question by developing a stochastic extension of a SIRD epidemiological…
This paper studies if and to which extent COVID-19 epidemics can be controlled by authorities taking decisions on public health measures on the basis of daily reports of swab test results, active cases and total cases. A suitably simplified…
Political expression through social media has already taken root as a form of political participation. Meanwhile, democracy seems to be facing an epidemic of incivility on social media platforms. With this background, online political…
The infection fatality rate (IFR) of COVID-19 is one of the measures of disease impact that can be of importance for policy making. Here we show that many of the studies on which these estimates are based are scientifically flawed for…
Countries are recording health information on the global spread of COVID-19 using different methods, sometimes changing the rules after a few days. They are all publishing the number of new individuals infected, cured and dead, along with…
In this paper, we study the trending behaviour of COVID-19 data at country level, and draw attention to some existing econometric tools which are potentially helpful to understand the trend better in future studies. In our empirical study,…
As the COVID-19 outbreak is developing the two most frequently reported statistics seem to be the raw confirmed case and case fatalities counts. Focusing on Italy, one of the hardest hit countries, we look at how these two values could be…
On 19th March, the World Health Organisation declared a pandemic. Through this global spread, many nations have witnessed exponential growth of confirmed cases brought under control by severe mass quarantine or lockdown measures. However,…
Anonymized smartphone-based mobility data has been widely adopted in devising and evaluating COVID-19 response strategies such as the targeting of public health resources. Yet little attention has been paid to measurement validity and…
Countries across the world have instituted unprecedented restrictions on freedom of movement, privacy and individual rights to control the spread of COVID-19. These measures tend to have been derived from communally orientated East Asian…
COVID-19 has spread all over the world, having an enormous effect on our daily life and work. In response to the epidemic, a lot of important decisions need to be taken to save communities and economies worldwide. Data clearly plays a vital…
How governments and Internet companies regulate user data on social media attracts public attention. This study tried to answer two questions: What kind of countries send more requests for Facebook user data? What kind of countries get more…
As a consequence of missing data on tests for infection and imperfect accuracy of tests, reported rates of population infection by the SARS CoV-2 virus are lower than actual rates of infection. Hence, reported rates of severe illness…
When the novel coronavirus disease SARS-CoV2 (COVID-19) was officially declared a pandemic by the WHO in March 2020, the scientific community had already braced up in the effort of making sense of the fast-growing wealth of data gathered by…
We present a phenomenological procedure of dealing with the COVID--19 data provided by government health agencies of eleven different countries. Instead of using the (exact or approximate) solutions to the SIR (or other) model(s) to fit the…