Growth curve models for monkeypox in Brazil

Abstract

This article uses the Brody, Gompertz, Logistic and Von Bertalanffy growth models to functionally relate the number of people infected with the monkeypox virus (Monkeypox-MPXV) to the number of days. The objective of this work is to identify the best model that fits the epidemiological data from Brazil, starting from the first confirmed case. To this end, a comparative study of the performance of the four models was carried out and, in the methodological context, the Gauss Newton procedure was used to estimate the parameters. The evaluators of the quality of the model adjustment chose, among the candidate models, the Von Bertalanffy model as the most efficient to represent the data set, since it provided more consistent estimates of the cumulative number of people infected with MPXV as a function of time.