Controlling people’s temperatures at the entrance to businesses and schools is essentially useless as a stand-alone measure to protect against the spread of COVID-19, and the practice can just as well be avoided to save time, said Drs. Anthony Fauci during a Facebook Live broadcast Thursday.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said temperature controls are unreliable, and it’s more effective to ask people about symptoms than it is to take their temperature with an infrared thermometer, which is an increasingly popular practice. is when places reopen.
“We at NIH have found that it’s much, much better to just interrogate people when they come in and save time, because temperatures are notoriously inaccurate many times over,” Fauci said.
Schools, joint ventures such as grocery stores, large corporations including Amazon, and Disney’s theme parks in Florida all use temperature imagery in an effort to prevent people with COVID-19 from entering.
Despite the popularity of temperature controls as a safety measure, their ineffectiveness in detecting COVID-19 should be rather obvious. One of the most well known and complicating aspects of COVID-19 is the likely number of people who have the coronavirus, or have had with little or no symptoms, let alone a fever.
That is not to mention the inaccuracy of readings at infrared temperature, especially when they are used on people in the summer time after they have been in the heat. Fauci himself said he was registered at 103 on a temperature control just from outside.
That said, while there is some chance that a temperature check could catch someone trying to go somewhere with a fever, the checks are unlikely to capture a significant portion of the COVID-19 cases.
“All in all, temperature images can capture some cases of the COVID-19 coronavirus. But it could miss many others,” Bruce Y. Lee, a public health expert, wrote last month for Forbes. “So be skeptical if anyone tries to assure you that things are safe just because they do temperature and symptom screening.”
Much of the opposition to reopening schools to classes in person is due to fears of asymptomatic spread of COVID-19 among students and teachers, as the risk of students unknowingly contracting the virus at school and bringing it home to vulnerable family members.
Statistics have shown that children without underlying health problems are not likely to have a serious illness if they receive COVID-19, but the potential for asymptomatic spread creates an uncertainty that some parents and school officials do not want to risk.
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