Epidemiological characteristics of 1212 COVID-19 patients in Henan, China

Pei Wang; Junan Lu; Yanyu Jin; Mengfan Zhu; Lingling Wang; Shunjie Chen

Traditionally, incubation period is defined as the period between the infection of an individual by a pathogen and the manifestation of the illness or disease it causes [32, 33] . Different infectious diseases have different incubation periods. However, for a certain infectious disease, its incubation period is relatively fixed. Since the number of pathogens entering the body, virulence and reproductive capacity, as well as power of resistance are different for different people, thus, it is reported that the incubation periods obtained from patients for a certain disease should follow logarithm normal distribution [16, 33] . Generally, incubation period can be measured by physiological observations and biological experiments [33] . The determination of incubation period has great implications for disease transmission control and policy making.