SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
How Infrared Images Could Be Part of Your Daily Life:
A fever is one indicator that someone may be exhibiting coronavirus symptoms, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends temperature screenings in a variety of environments, including schools and businesses.
[...] When the pandemic took hold, I started seeing more and more companies like Amazon using this technology to help identify sick people in their warehouses. Thermal imaging cameras are beginning to appear in Subway restaurants. Carnival Cruise Lines, whose ships became hot spots for the virus’s spread, said all passengers and crew would be screened when it began sailing again.
The rapid adoption of infrared technology had me wondering how helpful it could be. Several systems are being rolled out, including camera-based ones and others that make people walk through thresholds like metal detectors. Could they actually help contain the spread of the virus while we wait for a vaccine?
A Harris Poll conducted in late March, just after the majority of the shelter measures went into place across the United States, found that 84 percent of respondents favored mandatory health screenings to enter public places.
[...] The growing use of the technology has raised privacy and other concerns.
Civil liberties experts have warned about data being collected on employees and used without their permission. Democratic and Republican lawmakers have proposed bills to help protect people’s information and privacy as data like temperature readings is collected, but the legislation has so far stalled in Congress.
“The road to hell is paved in good intentions, and the mass rollout of cameras should be seen for what it is: the mass rollout and further normalization of cameras,” said Ed Geraghty, a technologist at Privacy International, a British nongovernmental organization focused on privacy rights.
“We already see police repurposing streetlight cameras, put in place to monitor traffic and environmental data, in order to form criminal cases against those accused of vandalism — it would be naïve to believe the same will not be the case with these cameras,” he added.
All of this being said, could this technology work if used correctly? Yes. Is it better than nothing? It depends who you ask. But while we wait for a vaccine to be made, many see the benefits.
But will throwing infrared cameras up all over society make us safer from the virus? How might a grade school student react to seeing a classmate set off an infrared-based alarm walking into school? Will the time it takes to screen everyone trying to get into a building create problems for schools or offices? These are important questions that we will face in a post-quarantine world.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 06 2020, @03:24AM (9 children)
Pointless to ask when you aren't trusting either at present.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @09:07AM (8 children)
Do you actually have anything to contribute about presymptomatic people transmitting the virus?
And these thermal IR cameras are probably safety theatre, not actually something that's going to slow the spread of the virus. The basic argument for supporting their use is that they're far more efficient than putting a thermometer on people's foreheads and waiting for a measurement. But the article demonstrates that getting accurate results is not as simple as just pointing a thermal IR camera at a crowd and instantly seeing who's warm and who isn't. It also requires some time to actually measure someone's temperature accurately with a thermal IR camera. As TFA notes, the measurements are most accurate when they're from a person's eye socket region.
But you can't rely solely on any sort of temperature screening. And it's going to be more accurate to measure someone's temperature by placing a thermometer on their forehead instead of this type of screening. It provides a false sense of security because, in addition to the large contribution of asymptomatic transmission, practical use of thermal IR cameras will likely result in a significantly larger amount of error.
The article mentions the need for efficient screening in schools. You'd probably be better off mandating masks in classrooms, requiring that windows be opened whenever possible to increase air circulation, and getting forehead thermometers for each classroom. When the student enters the classroom, they're screened and sent home if they have a fever. This would make the process more efficient without sacrificing accuracy as much.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 06 2020, @09:40AM (6 children)
Back at you on that one.
I notice from that point on, the rest of your argument is not that thermal IR cameras don't work for that very purpose above, but that they are far from perfect as the sole means of screening people for covid illness. For example:
We already know how to deal with "significantly larger amount of error" - such as using a thermometer and swab tests.
And why are you more concerned about the "sense of security" than if the thing works well enough? Remember, we just have to reduce covid spread to below one new infection per infection. A passive system that can flag people the moment they get a fever rather than the next morning (or later, if the people applying the temperature screening aren't doing it right).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @11:15AM (5 children)
I've provided multiple sources about the role of presymptomatic transmission of this coronavirus. Why are those sources, including two peer-reviewed papers, invalid? Do tell. I'll deal with the rest of your comment once we get this out of the way.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 06 2020, @12:21PM (4 children)
Because they don't support your argument. It amazes me how people can think that merely providing citations to scientific papers is enough.
I'll note that you already acknowledged that screening for fever is a part of effective control of covid. It's just a matter then of getting automated IR screening technology to a low enough error rate (which let us note, someone probably has already achieved) to compete with manually applied forehead thermometers which you already advocated.
It's game over, man.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @12:32PM (2 children)
Let's review what the actual papers say:
Paper #1 [nature.com]
Paper #2 [jamanetwork.com]
I suppose you could argue that I've misinterpreted the results and that someone with a medical background might reach a different conclusion. However, the other AC cited a review paper [sciencedirect.com] that cited a large number of studies:
The paper cited as [35] by the review paper is exactly the same paper I've linked to as paper #1. This clearly says that infectiousness begins around 2.3 days before symptoms develop, peaking at 0.7 days before symptoms develop.
How do these papers not support that people are most infectious prior to the onset of symptoms? How can you look at this and say they support a different conclusion?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:48AM (1 child)
Sounds like you don't know what your argument is then. Remember how you were claiming
The quibbling over when people are most infectious was supposed to be supporting your argument not an end in itself.
As to how infectious people are, you are missing a huge detail. Just because you're shedding covid, doesn't mean that you are spreading covid. The symptomless people still have to be doing something to spread that virus - like talking, singing, yelling, strong exercise, etc (the more forceful the exhalation the more likely to spread). Meanwhile the people with symptoms often have involuntary coughing, sneezing, nasal discharge, etc that are very effective means of spreading viruses even if their viral load might be lower. Infectiousness isn't just a matter of how many viruses are in your nose or throat.
Finally, as I already noted, you acknowledged that taking temperature, while not sufficiently effective on its own, would be part of an effective strategy for controlling covid. That's good enough for me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @06:46AM
The bottom line is that asymptomatic and presymptomatic transmission makes a large contribution to the overall spread of COVID-19. As you acknowledge, people who don't aware they're infected but have high viral loads may well engage in singing, loud talking, and physical exertion, all of which contribute to shedding viral particles into the surrounding environment. Because these people do not have symptoms, screening for fevers will not result in them being isolated, and therefore won't prevent them from infecting others. As you've acknowledged, nasal swabs (testing) and using thermometers to measure temperature are needed to overcome the limitations of thermal IR cameras.
A combination of masks, physical barriers, social distancing, testing, and using thermometers to measure temperature could reduce the spread of COVID-19 by both symptomatic and asymptomatic people. Because of the issues with thermal IR cameras to measure body temperature, I still question whether that is a very effective way to reduce the spread of COVID-19. At a minimum, such a system should be designed to minimize the false negative rate, even at the expense of probably getting more false positives. The issue with false positives could be addressed with using actual thermometers to measure temperature, which will almost certainly produce more accurate readings of body temperature than thermal IR cameras. Perhaps the temperature threshold for thermal IR cameras is lower and anyone above the threshold is screened with a thermometer, for which there's a higher threshold. But the overall false negative rate needs to remain low.
But there are other measures in addition to those I just mentioned. In work environments, employers need to adopt policies that encourage employees with symptoms to stay home and use sick leave. Schools need to be flexible about attendance and make use of online learning when possible. For indoor environments, it's also helpful to increase air circulation, so that virus-laden aerosols are more readily dispersed. As I mentioned in my original post, I'm concerned that schools and businesses will implement only a few measures like thermal IR cameras that can be done cheaply, and not take more costly measures that will also greatly curb the spread of COVID-19. If nothing else, this has to be part of a much larger strategy, not just a measure that's taken in isolation to reduce the liability of schools and businesses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @01:35PM
Let's think this over for a moment... Maybe this will clarify things.
Why are people being told to wear masks? Why are they being made mandatory in many locations? The reason is that masks, while not filtering out all viral particles, do a pretty good job of reducing the chance for an infected person to spread the virus. While masks may provide some benefit to the person wearing the mask, it's done primarily to protect other people. Yes, masks may reduce the amount of time people directly touch their faces, which is a benefit. They may also reduce the amount of viral particles a person inhales. But it's still primarily to prevent infected people from transmitting the virus. There are ongoing studies attempting to determine just how much masks protect the wearer, but that's not the primary rationale for telling people to wear masks.
Now, I don't think there are a lot of people who just won't give a damn and risk infecting others with COVID even when they know they're sick. Sure, there are a few people who might behave that way, but most won't. The issue is that many people spreading COVID don't actually realize they're infecting others. In some cases, the symptoms may not be easy to distinguish from allergies. Or it may be that the symptoms are extremely mild or not present at all. It was relatively easy to contain and eradicate SARS because people weren't spreading the virus until they developed symptoms and were obviously ill. SARS-CoV-2 behaves differently in that there's a large amount of transmission from people who are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic. Short of constantly testing everyone, we don't really have a good way of knowing just who is infected and then isolating them. Instead of locking everyone down, people are being asked to wear masks so they don't unknowingly spread this virus.
If it was easier to isolate infected people, as with SARS, masks would be less of a factor in controlling the spread of the virus. It is because asymptomatic, presymptomatic, and mildly symptomatic people so readily spread SARS-CoV-2 that masks are of such great value. Now, I'll agree that accurate temperature checks can be useful for isolating mildly symptomatic people. But they need to be accurate in order to be effective. And other measures like masks and social distancing are just about the best tools we have for limiting the significant amount of asymptomatic and presymptomatic transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @11:21AM
You know the day is coming when the bathroom stall will lock you in and call the authorities should you have hot pee.