Department of Preventive Medicine, Konyang University College of Medicine, Daejeon, South Korea.
Busan Center for Infectious Disease Control and Prevention, Pusan National University Hospital, Busan, South Korea.
J Infect Chemother. 2020 Sep;26(9):1011-1013. doi: 10.1016/j.jiac.2020.06.018. Epub 2020 Jun 24.
The assessment of the incubation period, which is the period between the infection and the illness onset, is essential to identify the sufficient isolation period for infectious diseases. In South Korea, a few cases of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) were identified after the 14-day self-quarantine program, and the length of this quarantine has raised controversial issues for the Korean public health professionals. We estimated the COVID-19 incubation period using the log-normal distribution from publicly available data. The data were obtained from the press release of the Busan city department of public health and news reports. We collected and analysed information for 47 patients with a median age of 30. We estimated that the median incubation period was three days (95% Confidence Interval, 0.6-8.2). We also did not find any significant difference in the incubation period between males and females. Our findings indicate that a 14-day self-quarantine program should be sufficient to prevent spreading in the infection of suspected individuals with COVID-19 in the community.
潜伏期评估，即感染和发病之间的时期，对于确定传染病的充分隔离期至关重要。在韩国，一些 2019 年冠状病毒病（COVID-19）病例在 14 天的自我隔离计划后被发现，这一隔离期的长度引起了韩国公共卫生专业人员的争议。我们使用从公开数据中获得的对数正态分布来估计 COVID-19 的潜伏期。数据来自釜山公共卫生部的新闻稿和新闻报道。我们收集并分析了 47 名中位年龄为 30 岁的患者的信息。我们估计潜伏期中位数为三天（95%置信区间，0.6-8.2）。我们也没有发现男性和女性潜伏期有任何显著差异。我们的研究结果表明，对于社区中疑似 COVID-19 感染者，14 天的自我隔离计划应该足以防止传播。
