Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/09/a-los-angeles-restaurant-won.html
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Well, that seems like a good idea.
I am sure I will be proven wrong down this thread…
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Now if only we could get our government to do this. China is already doing extensive temperature screening, even at traffic stops. Plus massive free testing, isolation of infected people, and massive medical treatment efforts including dedicated medical facilities just for covid-19
Then, to find sporadic cases, they do fever checks everywhere, even stopping cars on highways to check everyone.
It’s fucking shameful. We have a War on Drugs, a War on Terrorism, but no War on Pandemics. This will kill more of us than all terrorist acts on the US combined.
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So we all know the difference between oral and anal thermometers ?
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The taste.
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2018…
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Delivery food will be booming for the next few months, just got’a hope the person delivering the chow is not infected.
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are those infra-red thermometers calibrated differently?
I have a cheap one and it is pretty accurate on surfaces, but it won’t register my internal body temp properly by aiming it at my forehead.
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So I know what chain is going to be out of business by the next time I am in LA.
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Maybe I’m working from old info, but I was under the impression you could have COVID-19 and be walking around and spreading it without a fever or symptoms for up to two weeks. And some perople never get symptoms at all, but still spread it.
That said, I think this is a great idea just for general protection, as long as the same thing is being applied to the people who are handling the food. You know; the ones who can’t afford to not work because of the way our shithole country operates on the backs of the poor.
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Well, leaving aside false-positives, it only catches a small percent of people who are infected, as you can be contagious before you get sick, and largely asymptomatic even when you are sick. So it’s not of a whole lot of use, really.
You could ban everyone who was sneezing or coughing, but that would get allergy sufferers, too…
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Not necessarily:
There’s this big panic in the West over asymptomatic cases. Many people are asymptomatic when tested, but develop symptoms within a day or two.
In Guangdong, they went back and retested 320,000 samples originally taken for influenza surveillance and other screening. Less than 0.5 percent came up positive, which is about the same number as the 1,500 known Covid cases in the province. ( Covid-19 is the medical name of the illness caused by the coronavirus.)
There is no evidence that we’re seeing only the tip of a grand iceberg, with nine-tenths of it made up of hidden zombies shedding virus. What we’re seeing is a pyramid: most of it is aboveground.
Once we can test antibodies in a bunch of people, maybe I’ll be saying, “Guess what? Those data didn’t tell us the story.” But the data we have now don’t support it.
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They’re trying to be the…ahem…coolest restaurant in town.
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I’ve been wondering what happens if someone is having a hot flash.
I’m unfamiliar with infrared thermometers, and as far as I’ve been able to find, infrared sensors measure the surface temperature of an object–is that correct?
As for hot flashes, an article from Rush University, How the Body Regulates Heat, tells me that
During a hot flash, the blood rushing to the vessels nearest the skin may raise skin temperature by five to seven degrees, but core body temperature will not usually rise above a normal 98.6 degrees.
Is it possible that someone merely having a hot flash would be mistakenly thought to have a fever and be turned away from the restaurant? I’m hoping that someone here (with more knowledge and understanding than I have) can answer this.
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I was thinking the same thing. I read the incubation period is between 2 and 14 days (5 days on average:
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I’m surprised no one has proposed the – to me, obvious – alternate explanation for why the chain is doing this.
In a word, racism.
People have started avoiding Asian restaurants pretty much as soon as news of the outbreak in Wuhan became widely known. We can snigger all the want at the ignorant masses who refuse to drink Corona and cross the street to get away from anyone with the slightest hint of epicanthic folds. But the owners and staff of Sichuan Impressions? They have bills to pay, and a stupid person’s money is just as good as a smart person’s.
This isn’t the first time ethnic Asian people face this sort of prejudice. Look back to the SARS outbreak of 2002/3, and you’ll see plenty of reports of same. A friend was essentially thrown off a city bus in Toronto for having had the temerity to cough. Oh, and being of Vietnamese descent.
The chain is likely not doing this out of some misguided attempt to protect its patrons or staff. I strongly suspect this is a PR effort aimed at the people who will be comforted by the knowledge that no one with an obvious fever had suddenly developed a hankering for Sweet and Sour Shrimp.
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I eat at this place all the time. The clientele is 95% asian, as with most other places around here, all of which have been noticeably less crowded lately.
So if it’s a PR effort, I don’t think it’s aimed at racist white people. Folks in this area (which has a few of the most Chinese/Vietnamese cities in the US) seem pretty on-edge about the virus. Lots of face masks.
Maybe it’s because a lot of people here have close ties to China and might have friends/relatives who have the virus. So it seems more real and pressing to them.
Or it might be because we have a quite a few mainland tourists who come visit this area, and it’s generally a place where a lot of people coming from China are going to land, naturally. If I wanted to find someone who’d recently been to Wuhan, I’d probably start in the San Gabriel Valley. (That’s part of why I love living here.) I think there may even be a couple Hubei restaurants.
There definitely have been a lot of racist responses to the coronavirus thing, but in this case, you have a Chinese owner and Chinese staff seeking to reassure their mostly Chinese customers. It’s a bit different from someone avoiding a Panda Express in Des Moines.
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Same here. Mine (Kintrex brand) is all over the place, shows 32-35 C and not repeatable when my actual body temp is 37.5, which is normal for me.
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this country is going to be downright bizarre in a couple weeks when the positive-test count is going to be in the millions and the death count in the thousands
kinda hope they are right that a hot summer might put it all on pause for a few months (idiot-in-chief will take credit but whatever)
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