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

Meher K Prakash

Almost all countries went into a lockdown for several weeks. However, the new cases of infection continue to arise, despite the best quarantine practices many democratic countries could adopt. This raises several question -are estimates of the incubation period based on a few hundred cases reliable, or is there an alternative way to estimate this incubation period even if one did not have the detailed exposure histories? Or is there an alternative estimation one needs to do at the level of the community with the best quarantine practices possible? Are the new cases in a lockdown scenario arising from incubation or because of other factors? We address some of these questions by proposing a new way of estimating the incubation time.