Fever-Detecting Drones Don't Work

This article is part of Privacy in the Pandemic, a Future Tense series. Since the pandemic began, authorities in New Delhi, Italy, Oman, Connecticut, and China have begun to experiment with fever-finding drones as a means of mass COVID-19 screening. They're claiming the aircraft can be used to better understand the health of the population at large and even to identify potentially sick individuals, who can then be pulled aside for further diagnostic testing. In Italy, police forces are reportedly using drones to read the temperatures of people who are out and about during quarantine, while officials in India are hoping to use thermal-scanner-equipped drones to search for "temperature anomalies" in people on the ground. A Lithuanian drone pilot even used a thermal-scanning drone to read the temperature of a sick friend who didn't own a thermometer.