4 ms·

what's bullshit about temp checks? if it's being sold as a silver bullet that stops all covid (or something else) , well sure, obviously that's bullshit. or

what's bullshit about temp checks? if it's being sold as a silver bullet that stops all covid (or something else) , well sure, obviously that's bullshit. or is it the idea that it's OK to open everything if you just do temp checks, cause yeah, I can see how that would be bullshit too. But set a high enough threshold (to escape measurement error) and with accurate enough tools, it's one of the few public health things that seems somewhat evidence based: if you've got a verifiable fever, you probably shouldn't be out and mixing with others in confined spaces. hell, it probably made community health sense before COVID. obviously this doesn't stop non-fever, non symptomatic transmission, or people who dope themselves or their kids up to avoid detection, and it doesn't magically get rid of covid, but it picks out the low hanging fruit, and assuming properly calibrated equipment, seems like an obvious public health win to me (as I said, if you've got a fever, you should bloody well be going home/ denied entry to a workplace even in non-covid times).

ramraj07 6y ago
By the time the 75% of patients get fever from Covid they are often fully aware that something’s not right and are probably not leaving home or have already gotten tested, only the crazy ones would still venture out in that stage. Importantly, the reason Covid spread this fast is because the disease seems to attain peak infectiousness before symptom onset and definitely before fever onset. This is why SARS was nipped in the bud with IR scanners while Covid wasn’t. You say that temperature checks don’t hurt but they most definitely do, most places where they do a check, especially in places like India, they think they’ve done enough and don’t enforce strict mask policies or distancing measures any further. If people are forced to stop using temp screening then these places will have to come up with alternative methods of comforting their audience they are taking measures so they would be forced to do actually effective screening methods like taking o2 measurements. So yeah it’s stupid to allow temp checks to pass for any theatre.
- Angostura 6y ago
  >only the crazy ones would still venture out in that stage. Depending on location, that could still be a useful segment to exclude. People takkng their kids on a long-planned and long-promised visit to an attraction, who wake up feeling 'a bit under the weather' may be tempted to go anyway.
exmadscientist 6y ago
> what's bullshit about temp checks? Mostly the measurements themselves. Internal temperature is indeed a pretty decent indicator. Yes, everyone's normal body temperature varies a bit (and thus their fever threshold), and, yes, different activities will swing your temperature around a bit, so it is sometimes tricky, but internal temperature works. The problem is that no one measures internal temperature outside a hospital (partly because of sanitation issues). Everyone measures external -- skin -- temperature, usually using an infrared (IR) thermometer. Those things are terrible to begin with. But they're not even used properly! To get good results from an IR thermometer, you have to perform an emissivity correction. Which is easy enough for one measurement on one person in a lab, but it will and does vary between people by more than enough to cross the fever threshold. We've got a Flir E60 at work and have tried to use it to make this measurement reliably. We can't do it. It just isn't accurate enough. (You can get relative differences shockingly accurately, but unfortunately temperature screenings need an absolute temperature.) And that's a $10,000 IR camera, set up by skilled R&D personnel. Most places have a cheap Amazon-junk IR gun "thermometer" operated by the hapless. Maybe we could fix that somehow, so we always get an accurate measurement of skin temperature. But, as you've probably noticed by now, skin temperature isn't internal temperature. If you, for example, walk a mile outside to reach the "temp check" station, on a chilly day... your skin will be colder than the rest of your body. Well below any fever threshold, in fact, unless your fever is so strong that you're already well aware of it (and therefore actively lying, or you'd be in some kind of quarantine by now). So it's just not a measurement that you can make accurately enough to mean anything, at any kind of scale. Thus, the cries of "security theater". Because it is. I wish temperature screening worked, but it simply doesn't. Not the way it's used in practice, anyway. (And don't ask what thermal camera someone is using, because it kinda-sorta looks like the high-end one you tried out that doesn't work at all... you'll just get that good old deer-in-the-headlights look. Or worse. I was probably lucky.)
- nmfisher 6y ago
  Case in point - I was stopped from entering the supermarket here in Singapore because I measured over 37 degrees Celsius....but 5 seconds later I re-measured at 32 degrees, and was waved in. It is pretty absurd.

ramraj07 6y ago

By the time the 75% of patients get fever from Covid they are often fully aware that something’s not right and are probably not leaving home or have already gotten tested, only the crazy ones would still venture out in that stage. Importantly, the reason Covid spread this fast is because the disease seems to attain peak infectiousness before symptom onset and definitely before fever onset. This is why SARS was nipped in the bud with IR scanners while Covid wasn’t. You say that temperature checks don’t hurt but they most definitely do, most places where they do a check, especially in places like India, they think they’ve done enough and don’t enforce strict mask policies or distancing measures any further. If people are forced to stop using temp screening then these places will have to come up with alternative methods of comforting their audience they are taking measures so they would be forced to do actually effective screening methods like taking o2 measurements. So yeah it’s stupid to allow temp checks to pass for any theatre.

Angostura 6y ago
>only the crazy ones would still venture out in that stage. Depending on location, that could still be a useful segment to exclude. People takkng their kids on a long-planned and long-promised visit to an attraction, who wake up feeling 'a bit under the weather' may be tempted to go anyway.

exmadscientist 6y ago

> what's bullshit about temp checks? Mostly the measurements themselves. Internal temperature is indeed a pretty decent indicator. Yes, everyone's normal body temperature varies a bit (and thus their fever threshold), and, yes, different activities will swing your temperature around a bit, so it is sometimes tricky, but internal temperature works. The problem is that no one measures internal temperature outside a hospital (partly because of sanitation issues). Everyone measures external -- skin -- temperature, usually using an infrared (IR) thermometer. Those things are terrible to begin with. But they're not even used properly! To get good results from an IR thermometer, you have to perform an emissivity correction. Which is easy enough for one measurement on one person in a lab, but it will and does vary between people by more than enough to cross the fever threshold. We've got a Flir E60 at work and have tried to use it to make this measurement reliably. We can't do it. It just isn't accurate enough. (You can get relative differences shockingly accurately, but unfortunately temperature screenings need an absolute temperature.) And that's a $10,000 IR camera, set up by skilled R&D personnel. Most places have a cheap Amazon-junk IR gun "thermometer" operated by the hapless. Maybe we could fix that somehow, so we always get an accurate measurement of skin temperature. But, as you've probably noticed by now, skin temperature isn't internal temperature. If you, for example, walk a mile outside to reach the "temp check" station, on a chilly day... your skin will be colder than the rest of your body. Well below any fever threshold, in fact, unless your fever is so strong that you're already well aware of it (and therefore actively lying, or you'd be in some kind of quarantine by now). So it's just not a measurement that you can make accurately enough to mean anything, at any kind of scale. Thus, the cries of "security theater". Because it is. I wish temperature screening worked, but it simply doesn't. Not the way it's used in practice, anyway. (And don't ask what thermal camera someone is using, because it kinda-sorta looks like the high-end one you tried out that doesn't work at all... you'll just get that good old deer-in-the-headlights look. Or worse. I was probably lucky.)

nmfisher 6y ago
Case in point - I was stopped from entering the supermarket here in Singapore because I measured over 37 degrees Celsius....but 5 seconds later I re-measured at 32 degrees, and was waved in. It is pretty absurd.