Is 14-days a sensible quarantine length for COVID-19? A case study of COVID-19 incubation times

Abstract
To confine the spread of an infectious disease, setting a sensible quarantine time is crucial, which is however not trivial. It depends on various underlying factors, including a good understanding of the distribution of incubation times of the disease. Regarding the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, 14-days is commonly taken as a quarantine time. In this talk, we examine the distribution of the COVID-19 incubation time using likelihood-based methods. Our study is carried out on a case study which includes 178 COVID-19 cases with the information of exposure periods and dates of symptom onset collected. 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.