Maruotti et al. 2022 used a mark-recapture approach to estimate bounds on the
true number of monkeypox infections in various countries. These approaches are
fundamentally flawed; it is impossible to estimate undercounting based solely
on a single stream of reported cases. Simulations based on a Richards curve for
cumulative incidence show that, for reasonable epidemic parameters, the
proposed methods estimate bounds on the ascertainment ratio of β0.2β0.5 roughly independently of the true ascertainment ratio. These methods
should not be used