And cause others with symptoms to stay home in the first place with the fear that they'll be caught, wasting the trip (e.g. to LAX in LA traffic), keeping them out of the secured area & also off transportation to that area.
Why are you framing this as if there is a single "best option", as opposed to a plurality of complementary techniques?
IMO catching/discouraging a few people who have a fever but aren't isolating is worthwhile.
In my experience, I've only ever seen temperature checks at doctor's offices and hospitals, where they also have mask policies so "thorough" that I sometimes have to argue to keep my P100 non-glasses-fogging respirator on.
I should hasten to add that I'm not an epidemiologist, so I don't know whether this is true. But my intuition suggests that even if this is just partially effective it might still be worthwhile in the context of national efforts to control the spread, which is a numbers game.
I think this is a crucial distinction between "security theater" and "hygiene theater" -- security risks are not contagious and don't have the same potential for exponential growth that virus transmission does.
Last week I rocked up to operate at a hospital I irregularly work at which has recently introduced checks (as opposed to all public hospitals which have had this in place since March). In theatres we were talking about how useless it was. One of the nurses said someone tested high last week. They made the person sit in a chair for half an hour and then re tested them and granted them entry. To some degree I get it. I mean, my state is only recording 15-20 positives a day across almost 20,000 tests so the pre-test probability is small. On the other hand, what’s the point of a policy if it doesn’t change anything.
Another aspect of ‘hygiene theatre’ - when the apple stores reopened in sydney I happened to be one of the first back in (by coincidence). I visited late on the first day. I was initially impressed - security guard scanning, handing masks out. Inside the sales rep who served me had a mask continually falling down his face and kept grabbing at his face and readjusting. I eventually capitulated and told him he was wearing it upside down (metal bit across bridge of nose needs to be squeezed). Mask hygiene is important but pretty much everyone is so slack with them that, whilst they may be decreasing aerosolisation, they would be actively increasing spread of body fluids on surfaces, since so many people put a mask on and then immediately give up hand hygiene.
It’s all a bit depressing
While 30 minutes seems excessive, this makes sense. Your surface temperature is heavily biased by your environment’s temperature. Letting one settle in a controlled environment to test is reasonable to see if it’s really a fever (temperature will stay elevated) or due to environmental factors.
An issue is that anyone could ice their forehead in advance and beat the test. Dunno if too low of a temperature triggers a fail. In theory, everyone should have to sit in a controlled environment before forehead testing, but at that point, may as well do tympanic checks.
(Among many other issues, like the massive variance that’s probably accepted because of unreliability of surface temperatures as a proxy for internal temps)
Right now where I am, air conditioning isn’t common, but it was slightly above body temperature at the peaks of each day (I guess 100F). I wonder how that worked out with scans.
Given that the time from infection to symptomality is as short as 48 hours, this means it may be possible to be infected by someone before either they or the person that infected them has started to show any symptoms.
You may be very infectious when symptomatic, but you're likely bedridden and the few people around you are taking some precautions.
On the other hand you may be less infectious while presymptomatic, but live a normal life, effectively infecting more people right before you "get sick" yourself.
Now that likely won't work if you're in the throws of a Covid infection, but in the first few days when you're not sure if you're really sick? It probably does a great job of masking fever.
All that said, a low-grade fever isn't all that harmful. I still tend to take something. I used to try to tough it out before the experience above, but also found that without the body aches and headache that comes with the fever, I slept better while sick, even though I still would sleep for hours. I also tended to feel better a little sooner. Of course, this isn't data, and I've read the stuff about the beneficial fever before, but until general medical advice tells me to do differently, I'll stick to comforts.
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/fever/symptom...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/cdc-recommends-different-fac...
They’re no better than a surgical mask if you have a lot of gaps: they’ll filter nothing but your coughs. So little inhalation will be filtered because of the path of least resistance.
Obviously medical professionals or other people who come in close contact would be better off using medical-grade masks in a hygienic and consistent way- but for the majority of grocery shoppers and such, I thought the purpose was simply reducing your ability to spread the germs.
1. Store reused masks in a designated spot to avoid cross contamination.
2. Wash hands after putting on and taking off used masks.
3. Dispose of masks which get wet or N95 masks which get folded.
This care can be achieved by PSAs in countries with functional governments.
There are good reasons they are called disposable masks.
Disposable masks that the majority of people are using are are not for reuse, and it says right on the box "not for viruses". The "oh but large particles they (aerosol experts) didn't think of that" thing is surreal to see people say with a covered face.
Yet those same masks are reused multiple times per day. Taken on and off. The multi-day exponential hand wave fails on reuse, the exhale re-hydrates the medium. Masks have a finite capacity before they are a net negative, and cloth IRL insanity is a growth medium.
The psychology of "wear a fake mask for others" is next level propaganda. It's right in line with the drastically more dangerous social contagion that person X knows better than person Y and therefore is righteous to force their ideas (medical procedures) on person Y.
Conditioning people to make medical decisions for others is too obvious, but here we are, fake masks and all.
It's a deadly religion, which repeats over and over in human history.
Line up. Right? https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/2020/08/03/oakland-unive...
"There is no benefit and there may even be negative impact." https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8583925/The-land-no...
-Seriously-: Why not wear the masks forever?
yet...
"Every single claim you make here requires scientific evidence as in actual studies that demonstrate such effects."
Boyle's Law: http://v6y.net/maskop2
Your turn, maybe you can start with "Reuse of medical masks is fine". This issue clearly is generating interest.
Can you say it? Why not wear the masks forever?
> Good to see an article calling this out. Temperature-screening might catch a few people who know that they have a temperature (or are just not feeling well) and are going to "tough it out".
The article says that 30000 people were tested. 4 people were false positives, 0 people were true positives. This is called ‘many false positives’. Yet the people who actually had high temperatures were supposed to be at home anyway, right?
4 out of 30000 is not many, they are not real false positives and the design is flawed anyway because people are going to self select, as stated. So the article is just bullshit. Let’s not even go into the rest which tells some unrelated anecdotes about Ebola and other diseases that are not the same diseases and serve nothing but to indicate vague trends under the guise of evidence.
> Here in the Portland, OR area I've noticed a definite change in how many people are wearing masks. At the grocery store, 2 months ago there were about 5% of the people not wearing masks and they all tended to be men in their 30s and 40s. At convenience stores in more suburban area, I was the only one in a mask. Now it seems like 100% of the people are wearing masks.
This is a completely unrelated tangent. According to this anecdotal non evidence mask use has increased among some stereotyped group and in some establishments. Even if taken at face value this tells nobody anything about the effect of the masks.
> Wearing masks, not temperature checks, is what seems to be our best option.
That’s an opinion, based on nothing, which even if assumed true means nothing. To the writer something seems to be the best option.
That’s fine and maybe it even is the best option.
But does it really help to announce they jumped on the mask bandwagon before ‘men in their 30s and 40s’ and people in ‘convenience stores in more suburban area’?
At the very least they provide false sense of protection. If people want to be protected, they should use a real mask designed for viruses.
In situations where 100% mask compliance exits, they are still not effective.
Fort Benning: "according to Elizabeth Howe of Connecting Vets. About 640 recruits from the 30th AG Battalion and 2nd Battalion, 29th Infantry Regiment arrived at Fort Benning in May for training and were immediately tested for COVID-19. Four recruits tested positive and were removed from the group while the remaining soldiers were placed in isolation for 14 days without any training exercises. After the 14-day quarantine, they were all retested and every single one was negative. Only then did the training commence – with the full panoply of obsessive social distancing measures, including mask wearing. You can imagine that there will never be greater compliance to these rules than during military training. Yet, just eight days later, after one recruit exhibited symptoms, 142 of the trainees tested positive. That is 22% of the entire group isolated and quarantined together. As they were young, none of them were hospitalized and most were asymptomatic."
https://www.theblaze.com/horowitz-from-fort-benning-to-japan...
And then there is the psychology, which is... more troubling to say the least. To the people promoting this pseudoscience, why not wear the fake masks forever?
https://stpauls.vxcommunity.com/Issue/Us-Experiment-On-Infan...
Here in the Portland, OR area I've noticed a definite change in how many people are wearing masks. At the grocery store, 2 months ago there were about 5% of the people not wearing masks and they all tended to be men in their 30s and 40s. At convenience stores in more suburban area, I was the only one in a mask. Now it seems like 100% of the people are wearing masks.
Wearing masks, not temperature checks, is what seems to be our best option.