Not sufficient is an understatment. They don't work. Here are some selected quotes from
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020...ad-coronavirus (Note to Holland-Kaye if you're watching - a lot of this data is from the studies you were asking PHE to provide)
"eight passengers who later tested positive for COVID-19 arrived in Shanghai from Italy and passed the airport screeners unnoticed"
"By 23 February, 46,016 air travelers had been screened;
only one tested positive and was isolated for treatment,"
"Thermal scanners and handheld thermometers aren’t perfect. The biggest shortcoming is that they measure skin temperature, which can be higher or lower than core body temperature"
"Between August 2014 and January 2016, the review found, not a single Ebola case was detected among 300,000 passengers screened before boarding flights in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, which all had big Ebola epidemics."
"Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, and Canada all implemented entry screening for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which is similar to COVID-19 and also caused by a coronavirus, during the 2002–03 outbreak; none intercepted any patients."
"During the 2014–16 Ebola epidemic, five countries asked incoming travelers about symptoms and possible exposure to patients and checked for fevers. They didn’t find a single case either."
"China and Japan mounted extensive entry screening programs during the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009, but studies found that the screenings captured small fractions of those actually infected with the virus and both countries had significant outbreaks anyway,"
"Researchers at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control concluded that approximately 75% of passengers infected with COVID-19 and traveling from affected Chinese cities
would not be detected by entry screening."
And from
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/19/h...cks/index.html
"At least one country has found airport temperature checks so unhelpful that it decided not to do them during the novel coronavirus outbreak. Israel used them in previous years for Ebola, SARS and H1N1, but found that they didn't work.
"It is ineffective and inefficient," said Dr. Itamar Grotto, associate director general of Israel's Ministry of Health."