Yesterday, April 9, 2020, the CDC (United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention) issued new guidance around COVID-19 to send potentially exposed critical employees back to work. In order to ensure continuity of operations of essential functions, CDC advises that critical infrastructure workers may be permitted to continue work following potential exposure to COVID-19, provided they remain asymptomatic and additional precautions are implemented to protect them and the community.
These precautions include:
- Pre-Screen: Employers should measure the employee’s temperature and assess symptoms prior to them starting work. Ideally, temperature checks should happen before the individual enters the facility.
- Regular Monitoring: As long as the employee doesn’t have a temperature or symptoms, they should self-monitor under the supervision of their employer’s occupational health program.
- Wear a Mask: The employee should wear a face mask at all times while in the workplace for 14 days after last exposure. Employers can issue facemasks or can approve employees’ supplied cloth face coverings in the event of shortages.
- Social Distance: The employee should maintain 6 feet and practice social distancing as work duties permit in the workplace.
- Disinfect and Clean work spaces: Clean and disinfect all areas such as offices, bathrooms, common areas, shared electronic equipment routinely.
Prescreening and regular monitoring are the first line of defense. These are primarily based on taking an individual’s temperature, since COVID 19 results in a fever. The assumption is that normal temperature is 98.6 degrees and fever begins at 100.4. However, a recently published a study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found the average temperature is more like 97.7, and a fever typically begins at about 99.5 degrees. This study found that, on average, women had slightly higher temperatures than men, and temperature decreased slightly with age. They also found that body temperature seems to run on a circadian rhythm, with the lowest readings in the early morning, peaking in the late afternoon, so temperatures, should be taken several times a day. At any rate there needs to be a way to monitor an individual’s temperature and track it to their individual norms to detect any abnormal fluctuations which may indicate an infection.
Taking a temperature may impose some risk since a person administering the test may need to be close enough to insert and read a thermometer or use a forehead scanner. A safer approach would be the use of a thermal camera that is built specifically for fever detection that measures different parts of the face and then runs a model to ascertain the right temperature. Hitachi’s elevated body temperature sensing solution includes a thermal camera that can scan at a distance of 1 to 3 meters and takes about 1 second for the analytics to read key facial points. It can be set to scan and alert at various ranges, for instance a different range may be specified for women versus men or for the elderly. It also measures multiple points on the face in order to maximize accuracy, which is rated to +/- 0.3°C (+/- 0.6 °F), depending on optimal configuration.
The thermal camera is part of a detection and containment workflow for the first layer of prevention, maintaining social distancing without invasive or labor-intensive methods while offering privacy protection.
• Thermal cameras detect high temperatures in crowds without invasiveness of IR gun to forehead, and allowing faster throughput and freedom of movement
• Automated alerts for temperatures above a preset threshold are pushed to Hitachi Visualization Suite software, showing location of detection and real time view, and the event is recorded for later analysis
• Digital incident footage, PDFs, audio, etc. are stored and managed in the Hitachi Visualization Suite Archive, with chain of custody and incident details stored in independent folders
• 3D lidar or video analytics provide foot traffic information for statistical analysis, with privacy protection. 3D Lidar can be used to monitor the social distancing guidelines.
For more information on how Hitachi Vantara's infrared video and 3D Lidar technologies can help flatten the Coronavirus infection curve please see
this post by Mark Jules , Global Vice President, Smart Spaces and Video Intelligence, Digital Insights-Americas.
Some western cultures have an aversion to wearing masks. Living in the U.S. it is very rare to see anyone wearing a mask, but when I lived in Japan in the 1980’s it was common to see face masks worn by my Japanese colleagues when they were not feeling well. It was worn as a courtesy to prevent their coughs or sneezes from affecting those around them. When one of my American colleagues went back to the U.S., he was given a box of face masks as an amusing going away gift as we imagined he and his children wearing their masks in downtown Palo Alto. Those face masks are a precious commodity today. The purpose of the mask is less about protecting yourself as it is to protect those around you. It works a lot better than sneezing into your elbow as some suggest.
While this new CDC guidance applies to critical infrastructure workers, which include, in addition to medical, hazardous material responders and law enforcement; workers in food and agriculture, critical manufacturing, informational technology, transportation, energy and government facilities; this is the first step in getting us back to work and restarting the economy. COVID 19 is so widespread that it will be difficult to determine who of us has potentially been exposed to this virus, even if we are asymptomatic, so these precautions will apply to every business and gathering place that we bring back online. These guidelines will also provide employee and customers with some assurance that it will be safe to resume some level of social and business activities. A customer would feel more comfortable to enter an establishment if they knew that prescreening was in place.
For more information on Hitachi Vantara’s response to the COVID 19 crisis, please see the latest update on our company news.
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease#Blog#Hu'sPlace