Incubation period and serial interval of covid-19 in a chain of infections in Bahia Blanca (Argentina)

Abstract

The objective of this work was to estimate the incubation period and the serial interval of Covid-19 from a sample of symptomatic patients in Bahia Blanca city during the period March-May 2020. We collected dates of illness onset for primary cases and secondary cases for the first 18 secondary patients infected with SARS-Cov-2. Estimations of incubation period are based on a log-normal distribution while we assume a Gamma distribution for the serial interval. In both cases maximum likelihood estimator was applied to estimate main parameters. Of the total of 18 cases of local transmission analyzed, 17% occurred in the presymptomatic and asymptomatic phase. The mean incubation period for symptomatic patients is 7.9 days (95%CI: 4.6, 11.1) considering the full sample and 7.5 days (95%CI: 4.1, 10.9) if the sample is restricted to the most certain cases. The median is 6.1 and 5.8 days respectively. The point estimation for the mean serial interval is 6.8 days (95%CI: 4.0-9.6). or 5.5 days (95%CI: 2.8, 8.1) for most certain pairs. The estimated median serial intervals were 5.2 and 4.1 days respectively. Comparisons with foreign estimates show that incubation period and serial interval could be longer in Bahia Blanca city than in other regions. Transmission from pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic is not negligible.