Estimation of incubation period distribution of COVID-19 using disease onset forward time: a novel cross-sectional and forward follow-up study

Qin Jing; Chong You; Qiushi Lin; Taojun Hu; Shicheng Yu; Xiao-Hua Zhou

confirmed cases detected outside Wuhan were used to estimate the distribution of the incubation period. 5 For each selected case, a censored interval for the incubation period can be obtained by travel history and symptoms onset. The distribution of the incubation period can then be estimated by fitting a Weibull, gamma, or lognormal distribution with censored data. However, this method contained two types of sampling biases: (1) with the longer incubation period, the patients who resided at Wuhan but developed symptoms outside Wuhan were easier to be observed and hence lead to an overestimation; (2) if the follow-up time (from infection to the end of the study) is short, only the shorter incubation period would . 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.