Coronavirus Rare Incubation of 24 Days Means Longer Quarantines

A new study shows the coronavirus ncov 2019 has a median incubation period was 3.0 days but the range is 0 to 24.0 days. This would mean that quarantines need to be 6 weeks long instead of 3 weeks.

Clinical characteristics of 2019 novel coronavirus infection in China

Lancet has published a study that coronavirus can be caught from contact with the eyes.

Chaolin Huang and colleagues reported the epidemiology, symptoms, and treatment of patients infected by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in Wuhan, China. As ophthalmologists, we believe that transmission of 2019-nCoV through the eyes was ignored.

11 thoughts on “Coronavirus Rare Incubation of 24 Days Means Longer Quarantines”

  1. Yeah there’s “sneeze/cough airborne” like coxsackie virus and then there’s the flu/cold which can waft around in the air at a cold dry train/subway stop for minutes just from the moist air coming out of an infected person’s mouth/nose.

  2. A paper I read (ok, skimmed) indicated that at 25C about 65% of coronavirus can persist in aerosol particles after a hour airborn (vs ~35% at 38C). But indoor aerosol particles ought to hit and attach to surfaces fairly quickly.

    Worst case would probably be if someone were to organize huge crowded parties with shared food, outdoors at night during cool/cold weather. But who would do such a thing if they knew a coronavirus was going around?

  3. This virus is mutating faster than science can keep up with. All you need is a few people with the 24 incubation period who left Wuhan and the law of exponents will still apply.

  4. If that’s their idea of a hospital, they could have just taken over some warehouses and convention center halls, instead of building new…

    But I guess that wouldn’t impress people as much with how the government is racing to deal with the virus. Recall the negative press around conditions in the Superdome during Katrina…

  5. Or it could mean it is now an airborne virus and they only had to be 50 meters downwind of somebody they didn’t see with their eyes 3 days before they showed symptoms.

  6. The point being that the median isn’t important.

    The outliers are what counts for the purpose of quarantine until a cheap test is available.

  7. Those 24 day folks were outliers. They may have just remembered a later contact and forgot an earlier contact. The median was 3 days.

Comments are closed.