Incubation period of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Busan, South Korea

Abstract

The assessment of the incubation period, which is the period between the infection and the illness onset, is essential to identify the sufficient isolation period for infectious diseases. In South Korea, a few cases of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) were identified after the 14-day self-quarantine program, and the length of this quarantine has raised controversial issues for the Korean public health professionals. We estimated the COVID-19 incubation period using the log-normal distribution from publicly available data. The data were obtained from the press release of the Busan city department of public health and news reports. We collected and analysed information for 47 patients with a median age of 30. We estimated that the median incubation period was three days (95% Confidence Interval, 0.6-8.2). We also did not find any significant difference in the incubation period between males and females. Our findings indicate that a 14-day self-quarantine program should be sufficient to prevent spreading in the infection of suspected individuals with COVID-19 in the community.

Keywords: Coronavirus; Incubation period; Korea; Log-normal distribution; Outbreak.

Fig. 1

Incubation period distribution of COVID-19 for the laboratory-confirmed cases with COVID-19 in Busan, South Korea. The estimated median incubation period was 3.0 (95% Confidence Interval, 0.6–8.2).