Incubation period
time between an infection and the onset of disease symptoms / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An incubation period is the time it takes between the day a person is infected with a pathogen (something that causes a disease, like a virus), and the day that the person starts having symptoms of the disease. For example, if a person is infected with the common cold, it usually takes about one to three days for the person to start having cold symptoms. This means that the common cold's incubation period is one to three days.[1][2]
With some diseases, like Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV, the virus that causes AIDS), a person can still give other people HIV during the incubation period. Even though the person with HIV has no symptoms, the virus is making copies of itself during the incubation period.