Feasibility and effectiveness of daily temperature screening to detect COVID-19 in a prospective cohort at a large public university
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Abstract
BACKGROUND: Many persons with active SARS-CoV-2 infection experience mild or no symptoms, presenting barriers to COVID-19 prevention. Regular temperature screening is nonetheless used in some settings, including university campuses, to reduce transmission potential. We evaluated the potential impact of this strategy using a prospective university-affiliated cohort. METHODS: Between June and August 2020, 2912 participants were enrolled and tested for SARS-CoV-2 by PCR at least once (median: 3, range: 1-9). Participants reported temperature and symptoms daily via electronic survey using a previously owned or study-provided thermometer. We assessed feasibility and acceptability of daily temperature monitoring, calculated sensitivity and specificity of various fever-based strategies for restricting campus access to reduce transmission, and estimated the association between measured temperature and SARS-CoV-2 test positivity using a longitudinal binomial mixed model. RESULTS: Most participants (70.2%) did not initially have a thermometer for taking their temperature daily. Across 5481 total person months, the average daily completion rate of temperature values was 61.6% (median: 67.6%, IQR: 41.8-86.2%). Sensitivity for SARS-CoV-2 ranged from 0% (95% CI 0-9.7%) to 40.5% (95% CI 25.6-56.7%) across all strategies for self-report of possible COVID-19 symptoms on day of specimen collection, with corresponding specificity of 99.9% (95% CI 99.8-100%) to 95.3% (95% CI 94.7-95.9%). An increase of 0.1 °F in individual mean body temperature on the same day as specimen collection was associated with 1.11 increased odds of SARS-CoV-2 positivity (95% CI 1.06-1.17). CONCLUSIONS: Our study is the first, to our knowledge, that examines the feasibility, acceptability, and effectiveness of daily temperature screening in a prospective cohort during an infectious disease outbreak, and the only study to assess these strategies in a university population. Daily temperature monitoring was feasible and acceptable; however, the majority of potentially infectious individuals were not detected by temperature monitoring, suggesting that temperature screening is insufficient as a primary means of detection to reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
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Continuous measurement of core body temperature can determine the stage of an ongoing disease.
“Another use of continuous measurement of the patient’s core body temperature is to determine the stage of the ongoing disease [155,156].”
From The Current State of Optical Sensors in Medical Wearables (2022) · cites this paper as [156]
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- Authors
- Facente, S. N., Hunter, L. A., Packel, L. J., Li, Y., Harte, A., Nicolette, G., McDevitt, S., Petersen, M., & Reingold, A. L.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
- Innovative Genomics Institute (US)
- Corresponding author
- Facente, Shelley N.
- ORCID
- Venue
- BMC Public Health
- Published
- 2021-09-16
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 1693-1693
- ISSN
- 1471-2458 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC8445011
- OpenAlex
- W3200917370
- Cited by
- 19
- References
- 41
- Citations by year
- 2024: 4 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 3
- FWCI
- 1.83
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- BMC Public Health (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- medRxiv (acceptedVersion, cc-by-nd)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- Innovative Genomics Institute
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Mathematics › Modeling and Simulation › COVID-19 epidemiological studies
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Infectious Diseases › SARS-CoV-2 detection and testing
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › COVID-19 Digital Contact Tracing
- Keywords
- COVID-19 pandemic, SARS-CoV-2, temperature screening, asymptomatic transmission, university campus, screening feasibility, screening sensitivity and specificity, body temperature, COVID-19 prevention
- MeSH terms
- COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, Feasibility Studies, Humans, Prospective Studies, Temperature, Universities
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