The COVID-19 incubation period has become shorter through the variants

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2022-08-23 01:00

International

Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash

The average incubation time for an Omicron COVID-19 infection is shorter than for other variants, according to international experts. The team looked at 142 studies estimating the incubation period of different variants. They say early variants Alpha and Beta had mean incubation times of 5 days and 4.5 days respectively, Delta has a mean incubation time of 4.41 days and Omicron 3.42 days, suggesting newer variants generally have shorter incubation periods.

Attachments

Note: Not all attachments are visible to the general public. Research URLs will go live after the embargo ends.

Research JAMA, Web page The URL will go live after the embargo ends

Journal/
conference: JAMA Network Open

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Peking University, China

Funder: National Key Research and Development Program of China (2021ZD0114104, 2021ZD0114105, 2021ZD0114101); National Natural Science Foundation of China (71934002, 72122001).

Media Contact/s

Contact details are only visible to registered journalists.