Comparative Study of the Gompertz and Logistic Growth Models on the Prevalence and Fatality of Covid-19 Pandemic in Nigeria

Abstract

This study models the prevalence and fatality of the Covid-19 pandemic in Nigeria from February 2020 to July 2022. It is a comparative study of two prominent models: The Gompertz and Logistic population growth models. The data for this study was obtained from the website of Our World in Data, OWID (https//www.ourworldindata.org). The Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) were employed to compare the performance of the models, and the number of iterations before convergence and convergence tolerance for each model was also put into consideration. The study revealed that the Gompertz population growth model provides a better fit compared to the logistic growth in modelling the cumulative covid-19 cases and cumulative covid-19-related deaths in Nigeria. From the models, we obtained important features of the pandemic, such as the growth rate and asymptotes.