These kinds of models can reveal a lot about diseases by inferring parameters such as their reproduction number, their incubation period, or their degree of asymptomatic spread.
While 11,000 people could potentially have been exposed, officials said incomplete contact-tracing information combined with the virus’s incubation period made it difficult to confirm instances in which people were infected on a flight.
The original 14-day quarantine period was chosen because the virus can have an incubation period of up to 14 days, meaning that it could take an infected person as long as two weeks to show symptoms.
For one thing, if just 1% of expected travelers this holiday season contract coronavirus, they may spread it to more than 500,000 other people over the course of the next two to three weeks given its infectiousness and incubation period.
The amount of time it takes for symptoms of a disease to appear after an individual is infected (seeinfection) with the pathogen that causes the disease.