Most infectious diseases have an “incubation period,” which is the time between when you are exposed to the microbe and the time you start to show symptoms. Incubation periods can range from hours to days (or longer in certain cases), depending on the microbe.

Coronavirus has an incubation period of up to 2 weeks. This means that if you started to show symptoms today, you were probably exposed to the virus at some point in the last two weeks.

Even though they aren’t causing symptoms during the incubation period, many microbes can still be infectious. Coronavirus is infectious during this period. So even if someone has no symptoms they might still be spreading the virus.