There are a couple links I came across recently about how airports are dealing with this, and could be dealing with this longer term.
Crankyflier recently did a
podcast on how airports are dealing with Covid 19, with views on short, medium and longer term changes. In summary, short term is reducing contact between workers and travellers, increased physical spacing and enhanced cleaning - basically a series of easy, quick and cheap to implement changes. Medium term, he thinks testing and tracing will play a big role - heat scanners (for what they are worth), and perhaps requirements to submit the details of the tracing apps being used to "prove" negative status for Covid19.
Longer term, he sees biometrics allowing us to move through the airport without having to physically deal with staff (as our identities via facial recognition and other biometric indicators allow the airport to identify us without documentation checks), and perhaps marrying this with health data to give a picture of risk of infection, though there are privacy concerns that come with that. In addition, the use of more automation and robotics to reduce human-to-human contact through the airport experience. There is also the use of individual pods extended throughout the airport, and even potentially onto the plane to keep passengers and workers physically distant from each other. Finally he mentions the use of sanitation stations to disinfect travellers at various points (I remember walking through disinfection pads at the airport - I think it was for foot and mouth disease back in 2001).
The second article is on Citylab and is about
why airport terminals are expensive to build but seem to only last a few decades before being obsolete. Within the article, it makes some predictions on how Covid19 and the needs for health screening may change the face of airports, looking at parallels with other events like the increased security after 9/11, and the shift that increasing size in airplanes from the early days of jet aviation to the A380 had on how we move through airports.
The uncertain fate of commercial aviation is raising any number of related questions about travel and life as industries attempt to adjust to a global pandemic. The last significant shock to air travel, the Sept. 11 hijackings of 2001, saw airports transformed with a vast new infrastructure of security in order to restore a sense of safety. Coronavirus could bring similar changes — and it could also hasten the obsolescence of facilities that already have strikingly short lifespans.
The article has a section at the end with some predictions of what could happen, including reducing access to airport buildings to travellers only (moving the perimeter from security screening in the airport to outside the building), and also mentions biometric health data and testing via temperature scanners. On arrivals, there is mention of the need for triage areas, where passengers can be separated pre and post screening depending on the results.
I found both interesting reading.