Community Memory of COVID-19 Infections Post Lockdown as a Surrogate for Incubation Time

Meher K Prakash

We propose a new way of estimating the incubation time only from the publicly available epidemiological data of the number of infections. The two advantages of this approach are that the exposure history is not required and in a pandemic one can work with data tens of thousands of infections. In the publicly available data on the number of new infections from different countries, one sees that the number of daily new cases (I(t)) actually increase for a few days (t) after the lockdown (t=0), before they decline. In an ideal scenario, the new cases after lockdown come from the individuals who were infected in the preceding days and after a certain incubation are becoming symptomatic. Thus the number of new infections on day 1, depends on the asymptomatic ones on day 0 (A(0)) and an incubation of 1 day, as well as the ones infected on day -1 and with an incubation of 2 days, and so on. Mathematically, the predicted number of infections I*(t) on day t after the lockdown is