Is 14-Days a Sensible Quarantine Length for COVID-19? Examinations of Some Associated Issues with a Case Study of COVID-19 Incubation Times

Yasin Khadem Charvadeh, Grace Y. Yi, Yuan Bian and Wenqing He ()
Additional contact information
Yasin Khadem Charvadeh: University of Western Ontario
Grace Y. Yi: University of Western Ontario
Yuan Bian: University of Western Ontario
Wenqing He: University of Western Ontario

Statistics in Biosciences, 2022, vol. 14, issue 1, No 11, 175-190

Abstract: 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 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 likelihood-based 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.

Keywords: COVID-19; Incubation times; Profile likelihood; Quantile estimation; Quarantine time (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12561-021-09320-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:stabio:v:14:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1007_s12561-021-09320-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/12561

DOI: 10.1007/s12561-021-09320-8

Access Statistics for this article

Statistics in Biosciences is currently edited by Hongyu Zhao and Xihong Lin

More articles in Statistics in Biosciences from Springer, International Chinese Statistical Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().