Employment: Coronavirus

(asked on 15th June 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of deploying temperature checks more extensively to reduce the risk of covid-19 being spread in workplaces which are re-opening as lockdown restrictions are eased.


Answered by
Jo Churchill Portrait
Jo Churchill
Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 25th June 2020

Thermal screening at ports of entry was considered by expert committees including the Department’s, New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group. The findings were that thermal screening would be of limited benefit and that it was not the best use of public health resource. From that work, we would conclude that temperature checks are unlikely to be an effective means of protecting workplaces as many cases are asymptomatic and of the symptomatic cases not all will experience fever as a symptom, and therefore would not be identified through temperature checks.

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