Thought of the Day - May 25 - Use of a Useless Test

With various venues and services reopening across Canada, management is looking for a simple way to test patrons for COVID-19. One of the most popular, due to its cost and simplicity, is using a thermal gun to take temperatures.

We now understand that only about 10% of COVID infections are "symptomatic". While a fever is one of the more prevalent symptoms it only manifests for a proportion of the "infectious period". This means that one-time temperature checks probably only detect 5% of people that could be infectious. Adding to this, someone with a fever just needs to, and probably will take a pill or two to avoid detection.

But this is just the start. If your staff ride bikes to work, if your customers stand outside in the sun, if you use a cheap gun, you may also get embarrassing "false positives".

So what is really being achieved here? Well, the hope is that those who suspect they may have COVID-19 are ignorant of how ineffective this test is and thus will stay away, and by seeing the test applied the rest will just get a false sense of security that there are no "carriers" around.

While thermal testing has its place, for example, a rapid check to see if there are changes in health status in a suspected case, I guess when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.

They say that desperate times call for desperate measures, but actually, this all sounds more like a modern-day witch test to me. Dr. Theresa Tam said, on the same day that Air Canada, for one, introduced thermal testing: "temperature testing is ineffective for detecting people with the virus" - on this point I agree 100%.

Cheers

Cliff