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

Meher K Prakash

A Weibull distribution with parameters l=16, k=2 has a cumulative probability that reaches around 0.9 after 30 days. This suggests that the new estimate of the incubation proposed in this work will require a lockdown longer than 30 days for a complete elimination of the asymptomatic cases. The longer incubation time may be a consequence of either an imperfect implementation of the lockdown or a genuinely longer incubation time in individuals that could not be estimated by contact tracing a few hundred individuals. We believe in the latter hypothesis, although in principle the nature of the conclusions do not change regardless of the causative factor. Practically, even if the former is the case, the approach we take is still relevant because several countries have implemented the most stringent measures. In that sense, although physiologically it may slightly differ from the incubation of the individual, this incubation at the community level with the lowest possible societal interactions has its own meaning. In this sense, it is imperative that one uses the incubation period of the infections in the community level into the public health models.