Fighting Covid-19? Check your children twice a day

Children can get infected with the Covid-19 virus just as easily as adults. The major difference is that in most cases kids do not get sick because of their contamination. But as soon as they are infected they are able to contaminate others as well. Especially young adults are at risk here, as the daily numbers show.

So what to do as a parent? First of all, check your own body temperature and the temperature of your children twice a day. As soon as you start measuring a raised body temperature or fever immediately quarantine your child and check with a doctor. Fever is an early warning signal that your child – or any person for that matter – may have been infected with Covid-19. So they need to go into quarantine and they have to get tested.

So how do you best check the body temperature of a person – young or old. Try to avoid using in-ear thermometers or these cheap point-and-click Chinese made non-contact infrared thermometers (IR guns). Why? Because both are not very accurate. Australian research shows that Chinese IR guns miss 80% (!) of all fevers because it is very hard to “hit” the correct spot on the forehead and perform a good measurement. In many cases you are simply measuring skin temperature, a useless number if you want to check if your child has a fever or not. In-ear thermometers are not very reliable either. The reason is that you have to push the thermometer quite deep into the ear canal of your child. Because anatomically the ear canal of each and every person is different you never know if you have positioned the thermometer correctly in the ear canal. So oftentimes people push quite deep into the ear. That not only hurts but it may also damage the ear drum.

A much better thermometer is the temporal artery thermometer. When using a temporal artery  thermometer all you have to do is switch it on and gently swipe the sensor head of the thermometer across the forehead. The thermometer very accurately measures the temperature of the blood in the temporal artery on the forehead, which gives you an extremely accurate reading of the body temperature. When performing a measurement it is impossible to miss the temporal artery because the sensor head of the temporal artery thermometer is quite big. Also temporal artery thermometers are very easy to use – even when your child is asleep. 

Besides measuring for fever there is more you can do.

Wear a mouth mask or face mask when going outside. Or at least whenever you are in the neighbourhood of other people or if you are inside a shop, an office, a workshop, a factory etc.  Wash your hands as often as you can. Always try to use soap. If possible use a sanitary gel. Always keep your distance from other people. If you have to cough or sneeze always cover your mouth with your hand and afterwards wash your hands thoroughly. And whenever you return home, wash your hands extensively with soap or sanitary gel.