Some may need quarantine longer than 2 weeks: Study
nNEW DELHI: Some coronavirus (Covid-19) patients might need a quarantine period longer than the currently mandated two weeks to become completely non-contagious, a new study has suggested.
The study, detailed in a paper in Cambridge University’s Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology journal, considered 175 cases between January 20 and February 12 to reach the conclusion.
The cases comprised two groups — a group that had travelled to China’s Hubei province, the epicentre of the current disease outbreak, and another that had not and was infected by other people.
The study used statistical distribution models and the average age of the people studied was 41.2 years. Travellers to Hubei accounted for 59.8% of the patients. There was almost no difference in clinical characteristics between the two groups. Fever (81.6% for travellers and 82.8% for non-travellers) and cough (40.6% for travellers and 44.8% for non-travellers) were the most common symptoms observed in the study.
For the traveller group, the study found that the minimum incubation period for the virus was one day and the maximum 3.8 days for the 95th percentile, which means 95% of the sample. The incubation period is the number of days between a patient contracting a disease and symptoms showing up.
The study found that for the non-traveller group, the incubation period for the virus was between 12.1 days and 17.1 days for the 95th percentile. This meant the average incubation period was 14.6 days.
This maximum figure is slightly longer than the currently mandated two weeks, or 14 days, quarantine period that is currently mandated by governments across the world.
The study noted that three previous papers had found the 95th percentile incubation period between 10.3 and 13.3 days. “It is possible that the incubation period of non-travellers was highly volatile…this could potentially pose a threat to the effectiveness of the existing preventive measures. The duration of quarantine period must be considered with caution,” wrote Char Leung, the author of the study.