Fever Screening and Detection of Febrile Arrivals at an International Airport in Korea: Association among Self-reported Fever, Infrared Thermal Camera Scanning, and Tympanic Temperature

Cho, Kyung Sook; Yoon, Jangho

The fever screening at the international airport identified six febrile arrivals-i.e., those with tympanic temperature above 37.8°C (Figure 1 ). This implies a fever prevalence of 0.002% (6 cases) among the total 355,887 arrivals from quarantinable countries. Further, the six cases comprised approximately 1% of the 608 symptomatic arrivals: two males and four females. Two cases were in 20s of age, another two in 30s, and two in 50s. Four subjects were Chinese and two were Korean. All six febrile arrivals stayed in China during the past 10 days before arrival ( Table 1 ). The monthly distributions of total arrivals as well as arrivals from quarantinable countries reveal that the arrivals had increased since January, peaked at the midyear 2012, and then reduced gradually ( Figure 2 ). Summer represented a season that had more arrivals than other seasons, followed by fall, spring, and winter. In comparison, symptomatic arrivals were identified the most frequently in April (n = 115; 18.9%). July, August, September and December had 12.3%, 11.2%, 9.2%, and 9.4% of the entire symptomatic arrivals, respectively. There were three febrile arrivals in July, and one in each September, October and November. Figure 3 ). Table 2 presents the association between self-reported fever and tympanic temperature. Among self-reported fever arrivals (31 cases), 2 cases (6.5%) was confirmed as the febrile arrivals with a temperature above 37.8°C. Of all non-self-reported fever arrivals (577 cases), 0.7% (4 cases) were identified as febrile arrivals. The χ 2 -test statistic shows that this discrepancy appears to be different at the 99.9% level of statistical significance. The results on the difference between the thermal camera temperature and tympanic temperature (n= 6) reveals that average temperature from thermal camera scanning and average tympanic temperature were 36.83°C and 38.14°C, respectively. As shown in Figure 3 , the paired t-test did not reject the null hypothesis, indicating that there is no significant difference between thermal camera scanning and tympanic temperatures.