Incubation Period and Other Epidemiological Characteristics of 2019 Novel Coronavirus Infections with Right Truncation: A Statistical Analysis of Publicly Available Case Data
By Natalie M. Linton, Tetsuro Kobayashi, Katsuma Hayashi, Andrei R. Akhmetzhanov, Sung-mok Jung, Baoyin Yuan, Ryo Kinoshita, Hiroshi Nishiura. medRxiv, 2020
1,386 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The geographic spread of 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) infections from the epicenter of Wuhan, China, has provided an opportunity to study the natural history of the recently emerged virus. Using publicly available event-date data from the ongoing epidemic, the present study investigated the incubation period and other time intervals that govern the epidemiological dynamics of COVID-19 infections. Our results show that the incubation period falls within the range of 2-14 days with 95% confidence and has a mean of around 5 days when approximated using the best-fit lognormal distribution. The mean time from illness onset to hospital admission (for treatment and/or isolation) was estimated at 3-4 days without truncation and at 5-9 days when right truncated. Based on the 95th percentile estimate of the incubation period, we recommend that the length of quarantine should be at least 14 days. The median time delay of 13 days from illness onset to death (17 days with right truncation) should be considered when estimating the COVID-19 case fatality risk.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Epidemiology, Modeling and Simulation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c93856286166003da2e2643127b249bbbb8b7656
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Economics and Econometrics
In Epidemiology
In Modeling and Simulation
Citations in the corpus
- Estimating the burden of SARS-CoV-2 in France (2020, methodology): “We assume that the delays follow a lognormal distribution as this has previously been shown to work well for SARS-CoV-2 infections (17).”
- Estimating the infection and case fatality ratio for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) using age-adjusted data from the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, February 2020 (2020, methodology): “7), this suggests we need to multiply the nCFR estimates in China [7] by a factor 52% (95% CI: 14–100) to obtain the correct value.”
- WHO Declares COVID-19 a Pandemic (2020, background): “These estimates are generally consistent with estimates from 10 confirmed cases in China (mean incubation period, 5.2 days [CI, 4.1 to 7.0 days] and from clinical reports of a familial cluster of COVID-19 in which symptom onset occurred 3 to 6 days after assumed exposure in Wuhan (10-12).”
- The Incubation Period of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) From Publicly Reported Confirmed Cases: Estimation and Application (2020, background): “6 days), with a range of 2 to 14 days (8).”
- SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater: State of the knowledge and research needs (2020, neutral): “SARS-CoV-2 is known to cause asymptomatic or pauci-symptomatic infections (Lai et al., 2020; Mizumoto et al., 2020; Nishiura et al., 2020; A. Tang et al., 2020a) making it difficult to determine the actual degree of viral circulation in a community and in making comparisons among different countries”
- Evolving epidemiology and transmission dynamics of coronavirus disease 2019 outside Hubei province, China: a descriptive and modelling study (2020, background): “We analysed the time between symptom onset in 35 secondary cases and 28 corresponding primary cases (appendix pp [19] [20] [21] [22] .”
- Estimation of the asymptomatic ratio of novel coronavirus infections (COVID-19) (2020, background): “In general, asymptomatic infections cannot be recognized if they are not confirmed by RT-PCR or other laboratory testing, and symptomatic cases may not be detected if they do not seek medical attention (Nishiura et al., 2020b).”