Bill St. Clair is a blogger, programmer and libertarian.

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You might not have heard of Benford’s law. It’s not so much a law, it’s really just an observation that when you get a large enough set of natural numbers, let’s say a list of all the countries in the world by population, in sets of numbers like that, the first digit is 1 much more often than you would expect. And where the numbers don’t begin with 1, the next most likely starting digit is 2, and it goes on down like that, and the least likely starting digit is 9.

So, if you look at the list of countries by population, there’s China and India in the one-point-something billion range, and there’s loads in there’s Russia, Mexico, Japan, Philippines, Bangladesh and Egypt in the one-hundred-and-something million range, but there’s only four countries in the two-hundred-and-something million range, one with three-hundred-and-something million, the United States, and that’s it.

Go lower down in the scale, and at every order of magnitude, countries whose population figure starts with a 1 are far more common, countries whose population figure starts with a 9 are much rarer. There are mathematical reasons why this is the case but they don’t matter to the point that I’m making.

Benford’s law is just one of a series of mathematical tools often used by people like forensic accountants who are trying to examine sets of figures to determine if they are true or not, because it’s surprisingly difficult for people fake a set of naturally-occurring.

This is something to bear in mind when looking at the figures from countries around the world regarding the corona virus outbreak, particularly because there could be a lot of people in the chain between figures being collected and published who are motivated to push them up or down.

A lot of other people have commented on this,