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Comment by mantap | Hacker News Reader

I don't share your optimism. The virus has been able to successfully evade e.g. testing people's temperatures in airports. It doesn't really matter if there are asymtomatic carriers or not, it doesn't matter whether people eventually get a high fever. What matters is whether people with non-specific/mild symptoms (a dry cough) can pass on the infection. And the answer is emphatically yes.

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Bypassing airport temperature tests is an incredibly low bar because it rarely catches other diseases.

Anecdotally, I've travelled multiple times with people who have had fevers and entered countries with routine temperature screening and haven't been stopped.

Human body temperature is also so variable that a small fever is masked by the margin of error.

You don't need to catch everyone. You just need to bring R0 to below 1. If R0 is a little over 2 in the first place you just need to catch a little over 50% of the infected with all your actions (in addition to temperature checking) to eventually control the epidemic. The better you do the sooner you get it under control.

Not quite... You'd need to catch a bit over half of all cases _before they passed on the virus to anyone else at all_ to bring R0 below 1 in this fashion.

It's a low bar for many of the common and less deadly illnesses that we are used to. But relative to the mortality rate, it's more notable. People with SARS tended to get too sick to even go to the airport.

I've been somewhat shocked at seeing these forehead thermometers being used for screening. Forehead thermometers are not accurate. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24127699

I challenge HN's readers to devise ways to defeat a forehead thermometer. IF we had a hackathon around this idea, how long until somebody devises a method of communication via forehead thermometer reading manipulation?

Smear some alcohol on your forehead before the check, the phase change as it evaporates will drastically decrease the local temperature where it's applied.

If a person has a fever, then he or she should not be at a public airport.

Yes, I always cancel thousands of dollars worth of travel plans when I start coming down with something. I also always check my temperature right before entering an airport, so I can be sure to cancel my plans.

As long as airlines (and hotels, resorts, etc) don't let you reschedule for free or cancel for a full refund if you are sick people will keep flying sick.

The same as as long as people don't get unlimited paid sick days and protection from being fired, they will keep going to work sick.

These things need to be legislated if we want to reduce deaths and lost productivity from infections diseases (including the yearly flu)

Most airlines seem to allow rescheduling free of charge at this time? In Asia at least

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