We're all trying to practice social distancing and some of us are even in 14-day self isolation, but what happens after those 14 days? How do you know if you have COVID-19 or not?

Dr Jeff Cohen, medical director of the HIV Care program at Windsor Regional Hospital and the Rehab Programs at Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare, answers some burning questions about COVID-19.

He spoke with Windsor Morning host Tony Doucette to offer some insights. Here's what he said:

It's based on the last coronavirus epidemic and data that came out of understanding how that virus worked. It looked like about two weeks was probably the right amount of time that someone who could potentially be infected on day one, would have finally shown symptoms and been able to be identified as a case.

So if you're at home for two weeks, not contacting anybody and you don't develop symptoms of COVID-19 like a high fever, dry cough or perhaps some other symptoms — than you really are essentially infection free.

Right now, the evidence is that its an average of five days — anywhere from two to seven or eight days it would take to develop symptoms.

Most people who are infected and start to show symptoms would probably recover within about seven days. The sickest people, however, some of the sickest people that required hospitalization, oxygen, intubation or mechanical ventilation can actually shed virus up to about 20 or 30 days. So the sickest people will continue to shed virus and need to be closely monitored.

The message right now is stay home. If you go out in public when you are pretty sure that you or suspect that you have this infection, what you're going to do when you go out in public is infect other people. You can practice social distancing, you can wash your hands, but you greatly increase your risk of harming someone else.

There is no treatment for this infection at this point ... so if you're not feeling too badly even though you have the symptoms, stay home, stay home and stay away from your loved ones, stay away from people who you live with and do not go out in public. Knowing whether you're positive or not at this point when there's a shortage of testing kits and we need to know the most seriously ill that we're dealing with. Stay home. Do not go to the assessment centre — stay home.

I think there are people who are in critical emergency positions. So, for example, doctors, nurses, people like that who have an important role to play in dealing with a pandemic. If you come back from another country where there are cases and you're concerned that you might have this and are feeling sick, this would be a way of finding out through the assessment centre. But right now, they're restricting the testing to people who have actually been out of the country rather than mass screening. On the other hand, if we had a more than adequate supply of testing kits, then testing a lot of people would give us a better handle on how deeply rooted this infection is in the community.

I think it would make our job easier if we had more, that's for sure, we'd be able to get a better handle on how many people in the community have this. But even at that point, if you have symptoms I would hope we would have more innovative ways of testing people that would protect the public. So for example in many countries ... they have drive by testing. You pull up, somebody who is appropriately protected would take your temperature, take the swab, get your information on how to contact you after the results come back and off you go back to your home — rather than gathering in hospitals or in doctor's offices or other places where you might infect other people.

Right now, we do have a few antiviral drugs for the flu, but they're not particularly effective and we don't really use them very often. Essentially, there are no treatments that are very effective for most of these viral infections that we get in the winter. And the best solution for those is to stay home and self isolate and stop spreading these viruses in the community.

It just means slowing things down. If we can implement measures in the public to slow down the spread, then maybe those cases or even fewer of those cases would be spread out over a period of many weeks and that would put a lot less stress on the system. The other really important point about slowing things down, even though we can't necessarily get rid of the infection in our community, there are hundreds of research projects going on now around the world testing out drugs that could potentially be very effective at controlling the virus. We're going to be dealing with this for a long time and so we need to buy time by delaying cases, delaying transmission and giving our scientists the chance to develop the tools that we need to really control this infection.