The World Health Organization (WHO) clarified that there will be no change in its recommendation of the 14-day quarantine period for the novel coronavirus despite Chinese scientists’ suggestion to prolong it.
A Chinese study entitled “Clinical characteristics of 2019 novel coronavirus infection in China” recommends that the nCov could actually have an incubation period of up to 24 days.
But WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme Executive Director Dr. Michael Ryan said long incubation periods could be due to a “double exposure” which they have observed in Ebola virus.
He added that the presented outlier, a term referring to a data point that differs significantly from other observations, need further review and evidence.
Dr. Roger Seheult, a renowned and credible online lecturer, took to their YouTube channel MedCram to explain about the things that may happen when longer incubation periods are done.
“There’s an infection that occurs in day 0 and there’s an incubation period of 10 days and then there’s another repeated one. This one may not cause symptom but this repeated one may cause symptom and that will be another incubation period” he said.
The medical expert said that the Chinese concept was interesting but stressed that there might be misperceptions because what really happens is that “the re-infection makes the incubation period look longer that it really is.”
“What they don’t realize though is that there is another infection that occurred and that the total when added up, yes it comes out to 24 days. But that’s not the incubation period of this infection to this symptom.”
Health authorities also reiterated that the Chinese study, led by epidemiologist and pulmonologist Zhong Nanshan, was only posted in a free online platform for researchers’ archive called medRxiv as an unpublished manuscript.
The website noted that “the article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed which means it reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.”
According to media reports, international scientists have been working nonstop to find immediate and concrete treatments for nCov which has now killed more than a thousand people in China and infected around 40,000 across the globe.
