Research-Coronavirus incubation period could be 24 days

The incubation period for the deadly coronavirus could be as long as 24 days, a new study has revealed.

the New research  was  based on data gathered from more than 1,000 coronavirus patients in China.

The study, produced by at least three dozen researchers from Chinese hospitals and medical schools led by Dr Zhong Nanshan, a Chinese epidemiologist who discovered the Sars coronavirus in 2003, showed that much is still unknown about the deadly virus named 2019-nCoV.

Fever occurred in just 43.8 per cent of patients but later developed in 87.9 per cent following hospitalisation, according to the study.

Absence of fever in 2019-nCoV cases was more frequent than in Sars and Mers infections, the study found. Such patients may be missed if the surveillance case definition focused heavily on fever detection, the authors said.

But among the 840 patients in the study who underwent CT scans, only half showed ground-glass opacity and 46 per cent showed bilateral patchy shadowing. This means that relying on CT scans alone could fail to identify a significant proportion of infected patients, the researchers said.