How long does it take to be certain that you’ve been infected with Covid-19? And if indeed infected, how long would it take for you to be free of the novel coronavirus? These are tough questions to answer conclusively, but here’s what the first 100 fully recovered cases in Singapore can tell us.

Several excellent dashboards have been created to track the progress of the Covid-19 outbreak in Singapore (click here, here, here, and here), and it would be pointless to try to duplicate what these better resourced teams have done.

In this post I’ll focus instead on exploring two questions on everyone’s mind:

Q1: If I test positive for Covid-19, how long would a full recovery take?

There’s no global standard at this point, and affected countries have adopted different guidelines as to when a Covid-19 patient is cleared to be discharged from a hospital.

In the Singapore context, Covid-19 patients are deemed to have fully recovered only after they successfully test negative for two swab tests at least 24 hours apart. Only then can they be discharged from the hospitals. This is done to ensure that the patients don’t go on to infect others when they return to the community.

In other words, recovery from Covid-19 symptoms alone is not considered a full recovery and would not qualify you for discharge from hospitals in Singapore.

So far, patients among the first 100 fully recovered Covid-19 cases in the city-state have taken between one and 31 days to be discharged, if we start counting from the day their infection was officially confirmed. The median number of days in this confirmation-discharge window is 11 days.

Q2: If I have symptoms, how long do I have to wait to be certain that it is Covid-19?

This is the tougher of the two questions to answer due to gaps in our knowledge of Covid-19, and complex cases with either no symptoms or buck the norm for the 14-day incubation period. In Singapore, the vast majority of patients among the first 100 fully recovered cases were confirmed within 14 days of the reported onset of symptoms like fever, sore throat and difficulties in breathing.

But eight patients had no symptoms and eight cases took 15 days or more before they were confirmed. There is no conclusive explanation so far for these unusual cases, as well as similar ones that have been reported around the world.