  The coronavirus which appeared in December 2019 in Wuhan has spread out
worldwide and caused the death of more than 280,000 people (as of May, 11
2020). Since February 2020, doubts were raised about the numbers of confirmed
cases and deaths reported by the Chinese government. In this paper, we examine
data available from China at the city and provincial levels and we compare them
with Canadian provincial data, US state data and French regional data. We
consider cumulative and daily numbers of confirmed cases and deaths and examine
these numbers through the lens of their first two digits and in particular we
measure departures of these first two digits to the Newcomb-Benford
distribution, often used to detect frauds. Our finding is that there is no
evidence that cumulative and daily numbers of confirmed cases and deaths for
all these countries have different first or second digit distributions. We also
show that the Newcomb-Benford distribution cannot be rejected for these data.
