One of the best ways of containing the spread of COVID-19 is to rapidly identify people infected with the coronavirus and prevent them from passing it to others.

Temperature checks are now being used as a public screening tool for identifying people with COVID-19, with countries such as Taiwan using temperature checks as a key component of their containment measures.

Yet there is little scientific evidence that temperature checks enable reliable detection of COVID-19.

For a start, handheld scanners only measure skin temperature, which can be variable, rather than core temperature — and there are issues with unreliable equipment.