Incubation Period and Other Epidemiological Characteristics of 2019 Novel Coronavirus Infections with Right Truncation: A Statistical Analysis of Publicly Available Case Data

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…

• JA
  Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development

  Award: JP18fk0108050
• MO
  Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology
• IF
  Inamori Foundation
• CS
  China Scholarship Council
• JS
  Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

  Award: H.N.: 17H04701, 17H05808, 18H04895 and 19H01074; R.K.: 18J21587
• CR
  Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology

  Award: JPMJCR1413