China coronavirus: study places incubation period around 5 days
- Chinese team said their findings support a 14-day medical observation period for people exposed to the pathogen
- Study comes as WHO considers issuing a global alarm over spread of virus
The period between exposure to the new coronavirus that originated in China and symptoms is 5.2 days on average, but varies greatly among patients, according to one of the largest studies yet published on the deadly epidemic.
While admitting that the estimate is “imprecise”, the Chinese team behind a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on Wednesday said their findings support a 14-day medical observation period for people exposed to the pathogen.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) said in an update Monday that the incubation period ranged from between two and 10 days before symptoms like fever, cough, shortness of breath and acute respiratory distress emerged.
The incubation period estimate in the new study was based on 10 patients.
The researchers also studied the virus’s first 425 patients in order to establish two other fundamental characteristics of the outbreak.
Since it first emerged in Wuhan in December, the number of cases of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus doubled every 7.4 days, the researchers wrote.
They also estimated that each infected person then infected an average of 2.2 other people, a figure known as the basic reproductive number, or R0 (pronounced “R-naught”).