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Comment by tylerhou | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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