Researchers, studying the novel coronavirus, have found that the time between cases in a chain of transmission is less than a week, and over 10 per cent of patients are infected by someone who has the virus, but does not show symptoms yet, a finding that may help public health officials contain the pandemic.
The study, published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, estimated what’s called the serial interval of the coronavirus by measuring the time it takes for symptoms to appear in two people with the virus — the person who infects another, and the infected second person.
According to the researchers, including those from the University of Texas at Austin, the average serial interval for the novel coronavirus in China was approximately four days.
They said the speed of an epidemic depends on two things — how many people each case infects, and how long it takes cases to spread.