An additional strength of this study is that it is community-based [21] , enabling day-by-day capture of information on the early course of illness and on the full clinical spectrum of symptomatic dengue. In contrast, nearly all previous studies enrolled patients upon presentation to a hospital [18] , where patients present later; thus, these studies were unable to capture information on the early days of illness or on mild disease. By examining the clinical spectrum of dengue by day of illness, we were able to detect differences in the prevalence of signs and symptoms that could not be revealed by simply analyzing whether they ever occurred over the course of illness. In addition, through multivariable longitudinal models, we were able to identify distinguishing features of dengue during the early phase of illness compared to the entire course of illness. These findings are important for clinical practice since outside of the hospital setting, clinicians may see dengue patients toward the beginning of their illness and utilize that information to decide whether their patient has dengue or another febrile illness. The results of these models should be extended for the development of prediction algorithms to aid clinicians in diagnosing suspected dengue.