[ta8645]

The lack of this being seriously addressed and remedied hurts the reputation of science in general. It also undermines the argument in areas of public policy around say Covid, where "listen to the science" has to overcome the perception that a lot of what passes for science... isn't.

[ramraj07]

In Covid it was far more visibly clear this was and continues to happen. Everyone knows in their hearts that temp check is bullshit but that’s something everyone does even today. The about face on mask policy initially probably still plays a role in people’s perception and inability to follow rules today.

[jjbinx007]

> Everyone knows in their hearts that temp check is bullshit but that’s something everyone does even today.

All our local visitor attractions (and I suspect it's the same UK wide) do temp checks on condition of entry. Pointing out the flaws with it is futile as it's the covid equivalent of security theatre. It ticks a box and makes it look like they are taking precautions.

It reminds me of those snake oil bomb detectors that are still used in some parts of the world despite the fact that the 'inventors' have been jailed for selling the fraudulent devices: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29459896

[ACow_Adonis]

what's bullshit about temp checks?

if it's being sold as a silver bullet that stops all covid (or something else) , well sure, obviously that's bullshit.

or is it the idea that it's OK to open everything if you just do temp checks, cause yeah, I can see how that would be bullshit too.

But set a high enough threshold (to escape measurement error) and with accurate enough tools, it's one of the few public health things that seems somewhat evidence based: if you've got a verifiable fever, you probably shouldn't be out and mixing with others in confined spaces.

hell, it probably made community health sense before COVID.

obviously this doesn't stop non-fever, non symptomatic transmission, or people who dope themselves or their kids up to avoid detection, and it doesn't magically get rid of covid, but it picks out the low hanging fruit, and assuming properly calibrated equipment, seems like an obvious public health win to me (as I said, if you've got a fever, you should bloody well be going home/ denied entry to a workplace even in non-covid times).

[ramraj07]

By the time the 75% of patients get fever from Covid they are often fully aware that something’s not right and are probably not leaving home or have already gotten tested, only the crazy ones would still venture out in that stage.

Importantly, the reason Covid spread this fast is because the disease seems to attain peak infectiousness before symptom onset and definitely before fever onset. This is why SARS was nipped in the bud with IR scanners while Covid wasn’t.

You say that temperature checks don’t hurt but they most definitely do, most places where they do a check, especially in places like India, they think they’ve done enough and don’t enforce strict mask policies or distancing measures any further. If people are forced to stop using temp screening then these places will have to come up with alternative methods of comforting their audience they are taking measures so they would be forced to do actually effective screening methods like taking o2 measurements. So yeah it’s stupid to allow temp checks to pass for any theatre.

[Angostura]

>only the crazy ones would still venture out in that stage.

Depending on location, that could still be a useful segment to exclude. People takkng their kids on a long-planned and long-promised visit to an attraction, who wake up feeling 'a bit under the weather' may be tempted to go anyway.

[exmadscientist]

> what's bullshit about temp checks?

Mostly the measurements themselves.

Internal temperature is indeed a pretty decent indicator. Yes, everyone's normal body temperature varies a bit (and thus their fever threshold), and, yes, different activities will swing your temperature around a bit, so it is sometimes tricky, but internal temperature works.

The problem is that no one measures internal temperature outside a hospital (partly because of sanitation issues). Everyone measures external -- skin -- temperature, usually using an infrared (IR) thermometer.

Those things are terrible to begin with. But they're not even used properly!

To get good results from an IR thermometer, you have to perform an emissivity correction. Which is easy enough for one measurement on one person in a lab, but it will and does vary between people by more than enough to cross the fever threshold. We've got a Flir E60 at work and have tried to use it to make this measurement reliably. We can't do it. It just isn't accurate enough. (You can get relative differences shockingly accurately, but unfortunately temperature screenings need an absolute temperature.) And that's a $10,000 IR camera, set up by skilled R&D personnel. Most places have a cheap Amazon-junk IR gun "thermometer" operated by the hapless.

Maybe we could fix that somehow, so we always get an accurate measurement of skin temperature. But, as you've probably noticed by now, skin temperature isn't internal temperature. If you, for example, walk a mile outside to reach the "temp check" station, on a chilly day... your skin will be colder than the rest of your body. Well below any fever threshold, in fact, unless your fever is so strong that you're already well aware of it (and therefore actively lying, or you'd be in some kind of quarantine by now).

So it's just not a measurement that you can make accurately enough to mean anything, at any kind of scale.

Thus, the cries of "security theater". Because it is.

I wish temperature screening worked, but it simply doesn't. Not the way it's used in practice, anyway. (And don't ask what thermal camera someone is using, because it kinda-sorta looks like the high-end one you tried out that doesn't work at all... you'll just get that good old deer-in-the-headlights look. Or worse. I was probably lucky.)

[nmfisher]

Case in point - I was stopped from entering the supermarket here in Singapore because I measured over 37 degrees Celsius....but 5 seconds later I re-measured at 32 degrees, and was waved in.

It is pretty absurd.

[ACow_Adonis]

So this comes back to my statement about proper equipment and proper thresholds.

obviously 37 practically isn't a fever, and 32 is ridiculous.

But let's accept it on face value, so it gave you a false positive, which caused you to pause for a second reading, and then a true negative (well, unless you count the 32 as a false positive for hypothermia) and you went in.

That temp checks create false readings isn't really news: for me the question is so they create statistically significantly better outcomes. As a statistics guy, my head says they do. The objections I hear to them sound to me like the objections to bmi: that it's not universally perfect is not reason to dismiss it. This seems to me like the perfect being the enemy of the good enough.

[ramraj07]

You called yourself a stats guy so I’m going to push, can you show any rigorous analysis by anyone suggesting that theres any benefit to doing temp checks? Is there any number anywhere that gives false positive rate estimates for typically used temperature checking methods? Or false negatives?

[youerbt]

Well in case of public policy it's rather lack of trust in public policy. And in cases like Covid public policy should be ahead of science anyway, because there is no time to wait.

[paganel]

Maybe we should try to detangle public policy from science for a while, it hurts both public policy and science.

[KSteffensen]

But shouldn't public policy be informed by (high-quality) science?

[paganel]

Why?

Science (especially social sciences) is many, many times wrong, by definition (that's what science does, it gets less and less wrong until it reaches a certain epsilon of "less wrong" which it considers as the "truth").

This is not the fault of science because, again, errors/being wrong are included in its definition, so to speak, the problem is that those errors/wrongs, when applied to the life of real people, with real human lives, will most probably kill them or affect their lives negatively in very big ways, especially so if it's a concerted effort coming from the top.

There are countless examples for that, the latest that comes to my mind is the pro-austerity policy imposed by the IMF on Greece, because that's what the science of economics was advising at the time, i.e. austerity. It turned out that that was a mistake (and IMF were quick to acknowledge it), but by that moment the damage had already been done.

There's also the example of failed policies imposed by the likes of Robert McNamara and his men (they were mostly men) back in the 1960s, but I didn't catch those times in person, so I only know about those failures via links found on this website (and which I'm too lazy to search for right now).

[KSteffensen]

The way I read your argument is "science is not 100% correct, only 85% correct. That means they are 15% wrong. Since science is 15% wrong and those 15% wrong will have negative consequences, we should ignore science and do what we feel is the right".

I acknowledge that science doesn't have all the answers and probably never will. However, I believe it is better to take its results into account when making public policy instead of relying on gut feeling or ideology.

I certainly hope science is taken into account when deciding things like building regulations, fisheries quotas and food additive regulations.

[enkid]

If we disregard "science" how are we going to make any decisions? It's not like we're using magic here. Science is simply a way of attaining and verifying knowledge. To abandonment means to abandon those thought process for evidence, etc. Rejecting bad science is important, but science is the thing most equipped to do that. The alternative is doing things based on personal experience or a belief system, which historically have had worse results.

[jjk166]

Every way of thinking is wrong, but science very quickly becomes least wrong.

Yes of course there will be cases where doing what the science says produces a bad result, but that is no reason to trust the tea leaves instead. The question is not who is right, it's who is closest to being right. On average, science will consistently outperform all other approaches.

[bryanrasmussen]

there's lots of public policy that is antagonistic to more grounded science than the social sciences, science that while it can be proven wrong at some point is unlikely to be and if it is proven wrong will probably be in small particulars rather than in the large. Evolutionary theory would be one obvious example.

[_0ffh]

Some social sciences are not even trying to be scientific anymore. They have denounced even the mere concepts of truth and of the scientific method as a tool to approximate it. These people need to be removed from academic life and from all teaching positions as a matter of self defence. (Ed. And they and their sympathisers obviously know who they are.)