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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: 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.