Abstract
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 COVID19 pandemic, the 14days is currently taken as a quarantine time almost by all the places. However, it is unclear how likely it is for an exposed individual to show signs of illness after being quarantined for 14days. To explore the plausibility of setting 14days as a quarantine time of COVID19, we analyze a dataset of 178 COVID19 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 analyze incubation times of COVID19 from different angles. Our findings suggest that the current recommended 14day quarantine time is not long enough to control the probability of an early release of infected individuals to be small.
