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

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

The estimation of the incubation period of COVID-19 is a very difficult task. The main difficulty is in that it is difficult to determine the infected time. Based on patients' information, some works have reported the incubation period of COVID-19. For example, Yang et al. [4] reported that the median incubation period of COVID-19 is 4.75 days; the interquartile range is 3.0 − 7.2 days. Hereinafter, we try to estimate the incubation period of patients in Henan. The collected data are with varied quality, many descriptions of patients only told us when the person left Wuhan, or When she/he had suspicious contacts with persons from Wuhan or suspicious persons (Following, we call they are exposed). To facilitate us to estimate the incubation period, we define estimated incubation period as the period from the date of exposure to the date of appearing clinical symptoms or making a definite diagnosis. Apparently, such definition overestimates the actual incubation period. For example, the information from a patient . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.