To confine the spread of an infectious disease, setting a sensible quarantine time is crucial. To this end, it is imperative to well understand the distribution of incubation times of the disease. Regarding the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, 14-days is commonly taken as a quarantine time to curb the virus spread in balancing the impacts of COVID-19 on diverse aspects of the society, including public health, economy, and humanity perspectives, etc. However, setting a sensible quarantine time is not trivial and it depends on various underlying factors. In this article, we take an angle of examining the distribution of the COVID-19 incubation time using likelihoodbased methods. Our study is carried out on a dataset of 178 COVID-19 cases dated from January 20, 2020 to February 29, 2020, with the information of exposure periods and dates of symptom onset collected. To gain a good understanding of possible scenarios, we employ different models to describe incubation times of COVID-19. Our findings suggest that statistically, the 14-day quarantine time may not be long enough to control the probability of an early release of infected individuals to be small. While the size of the study data is not large enough to offer us a definitely acceptable quarantine time, and further in practice, the decision-makers may take account of other factors related to social and economic concerns to set up a practically acceptable quarantine time, our study demonstrates useful methods to determine a reasonable quarantine time from a statistical standpoint. Further, it reveals some associated complexity for fully understanding the COVID-19 incubation time distribution.
COVID-19 is a disease caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that was reported to spread in people in December 2019. Understanding epidemiological features of COVID-19 is important for the ongoing global efforts to contain the virus. As a complement to the available work, in this article we analyze the Kaggle novel coronavirus dataset of 3397 patients dated from January 22, 2020 to March 29, 2020. We employ semiparametric and nonparametric survival models as well as text mining and data visualization techniques to examine the clinical manifestations and epidemiological features of COVID-19. Our analysis shows that: (i) the median incubation time is about 5 days and older people tend to have a longer incubation period; (ii) the median time for infected people to recover is about 20 days, and the recovery time is significantly associated with age but not gender; (iii) the fatality rate is higher for older infected patients than for younger patients.
In the midst of the global outbreak with over 300,000 worldwide death cases of COVID-19, Canada has reported 79,101 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) as of May 19, 2020, in which the severity differs from region to region. To provide a timely view and understanding of the evolving pandemic in Canada, we develop a real time interactive web-based platform which primarily includes data visualization and statistical analysis. The website highlights real time tracking of the development of COVID-19 with visualized graphs and forecasts future trends with applications of different statistical predictive models. By providing research-based statistical analysis, we are able to shed the light on the epidemiological characteristics of COVID-19. We also provide timely social news and preventive measures from the government on the website.
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