Prediction of the incubation period for COVID-19 and future virus disease outbreaks
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
Background
A crucial factor in mitigating respiratory viral outbreaks is early determination of the duration of the incubation period and, accordingly, the required quarantine time for potentially exposed individuals. At the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, optimization of quarantine regimes becomes paramount for public health, societal well-being, and global economy. However, biological factors that determine the duration of the virus incubation period remain poorly understood.
Results
We demonstrate a strong positive correlation between the length of the incubation period and disease severity for a wide range of human pathogenic viruses. Using a machine learning approach, we develop a predictive model that accurately estimates, solely from several virus genome features, in particular, the number of protein-coding genes and the GC content, the incubation time ranges for diverse human pathogenic RNA viruses including SARS-CoV-2. The predictive approach described here can directly help in establishing the appropriate quarantine durations and thus facilitate controlling future outbreaks.
Conclusions
The length of the incubation period in viral diseases strongly correlates with disease severity, emphasizing the biological and epidemiological importance of the incubation period. Perhaps, surprisingly, incubation times of pathogenic RNA viruses can be accurately predicted solely from generic features of virus genomes. Elucidation of the biological underpinnings of the connections between these features and disease progression can be expected to reveal key aspects of virus pathogenesis.
Article activity feed
-
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.19.104513: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources Elastic net was chosen because it has characteristics of both LASSO and Ridge regression, which are controlled by the penalties coefficients, thus outperforming other regularization and variable selection approaches34. LASSOsuggested: (LaSSO, RRID:SCR_003418)The elastic net model was constructed in Python using the scikit-learn35 ElasticNet function with default parameters. Pythonsuggested: (IPython, RRID:SCR_001658)Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was …SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.19.104513: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources Elastic net was chosen because it has characteristics of both LASSO and Ridge regression, which are controlled by the penalties coefficients, thus outperforming other regularization and variable selection approaches34. LASSOsuggested: (LaSSO, RRID:SCR_003418)The elastic net model was constructed in Python using the scikit-learn35 ElasticNet function with default parameters. Pythonsuggested: (IPython, RRID:SCR_001658)Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
-
