A flight from Johannesburg lands at Fiumicino and the symptoms of a sample of passengers are checked at the gate and then inserted into an algorithm. If the number of possible infections detected exceeds the control limit, the system detects a potential outbreak and moves on to inspect all passengers and flight crews. If the infection rate is under control, the sampling of the next aircraft is continued. An international research has experimented with an easy way to intercept the coronavirus directly upon its arrival at the gate, to prevent Covid outbreaks – as well as future viral epidemics – directly at the airport.
Vaia, Spallanzani: “Against new outbreaks, more attention in ports, airports and stations”
Between the end of December 2019 and January 2020, at the very beginning of the pandemic, when the spotlight on Covid-19 had not yet turned on in Italy, in a real international airport with limited resources, where 100% inspection of passengers did not was applicable, a group of engineers tested a health control system and predicted an outbreak without knowing what would happen shortly thereafter worldwide. Now the team coordinated by Professor Wrong Haridy Sharjah University in the United Arab Emirates has developed an algorithm that can analyze in real time all the data collected by health checks at the airport, offering the authorities a photograph of the spread of the pathogen in a country.
Alitalia, at the start of the test in Fiumicino: from tomorrow fast buffer at the departure for two Rome-Milan flights
After all, viruses know no borders and travel with us, and it is precisely for this reason that the spread of the new coronavirus has been sudden and global. Not surprisingly, one of the first precautions implemented at the beginning of the pandemic was the stop of flights to and from China. Then came the thermal scanners to detect the body temperature of passengers in transit, the cameras controlled by artificial intelligence capable of identifying not only those who have a fever but also those who cough and sneeze, the swabs directly at the terminal and the preventive quarantine. Now very simply, using this algorithm, it would be enough to manually enter the data collected by the airport staff with random health checks, or to merge the data collected by thermal scanners and smart cameras into a “control card”. It is a table that is automatically updated with the data entered at customs and, if desired, also with the data of the national health control. In this way, the authorities could have a complete picture of cases at their disposal and intervene early at local or national level.
Coronavirus, the new European rules for traveling by plane
at Deborah Ameri
The “control cards” normally monitor industrial production processes. But they have proven effective, easy to implement, and inexpensive when also used for detecting virus outbreaks. In their experiment at the airport, the process involved inspecting a sample of 185 people every 111 minutes, with a maximum control limit of six patients, and was able to detect a potential outbreak. This is because as the algorithm is “fed” with data, a graph is updated that visually shows the overall spikes of cases. The detailed description of the statistical method used was published in the scientific journal Computers & Industrial Engineering.
Covid, many fever scanners are unreliable
by Fiammetta Cupellaro
“Detection of respiratory virus spread at sentinel airports would enable near real-time decisions on the potential need for specific virological testing, patient quarantine, travel restrictions and other important epidemic investigation and mitigation measures, to prevent another pandemic. global, ”the researchers write. This is because a greater number of potential patients entering from abroad, combined with strong pressure from hospitals or a slow pace of vaccination, can lead to the establishment of a red zone even two weeks earlier than standard procedures.
“In light of global research efforts to combat the Covid-19 threat, we have investigated this topic to provide authorities with an effective monitoring scheme for early detection of outbreaks caused by coronaviruses and other major respiratory viruses – explains Salah Haridy – this system it has been designed to be particularly useful in high-volume situations and locations, such as airports where inspection of every person present is virtually impossible and sampling is a more realistic strategy ”.
The results of this study may now “pave the way for further research on various statistical engineering techniques for the early detection of outbreaks caused by coronaviruses as well as other common respiratory viruses – concludes Haridy -. Furthermore, the adoption of the monitoring scheme proposed by us could help to identify the origin of the outbreaks not only in airports, but also in different places ”, such as during a concert or at the stadium.
.