(funk music)
- So there's a new ritual that a lots of us share right now.
Checking our temperature to see if we have a fever.
And it's understandable.
Fever's are common symptoms of COVID-19.
But if you're hoping your temperature is a nice 98.6 degrees
or 37 Celsius.
You might learn something new about yourself.
- 97.25.
- 98.2.
- 97.1.
- Very low,
Am I OK?
It turns out 98.6 degrees fahrenheit isn't really the
ideal or normal body temperature.
There's really no such thing.
But temperature can still tell us a lot about our health.
And about the spread of COVID-19.
(temperature machines beeping)
The number 98.6 mostly came from 19th century German
researcher Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich.
He claims to catch the numbers of more than a million
in temperature readings to thousands of patients.
And he arrived at the number of 98.6.
That number has stuck around ever since.
But person to person
it's kinda meaningless.
We asked our co workers to take their own readings
and this is what normal temperature looks like for us.
- 95.83.
- 96.7 which seems low.
- I'm a cold,
cold man.
- Maybe [Inaudible]
I would have thought.
- It's fine.
I guess.
- Wunderlich himself knew that body temperature varied.
He recorded a healthy range from 97 and a quarter
to 99 and a half in his subjects.
Other studies have shown that temperature can differ
noticeably across age, gender, size and race.
And modern research points to a much lower number.
Around 98.
That squares with our very informal staff average.
We're around 97.5.
- You let her write the thermometers broken.
I don't know.
- What's more, you yourself don't have one body temperature
you have a range.
Our team all took their ratings at 10am.
But if you took yours a bunch over the course of a day,
you'll see it change.
Most people are coolest in the morning
and warmest in the early evening.
It's a reflection of your bodies natural rhythms,
your digestion, hormone production and cognition and more.
Here's what my temperature looks like
throughout the day.
- Other bodily cycles like ovulation can cause small
swings in temperature too and different parts of you
are different temperatures.
Under the tongue, armpit, forehead and rectal readings
are all likely to be unique.
Point is there are tons of variables.
We could be many temperatures all at once all the time
and still be perfectly healthy.
- But being sick is another story.
(theme sound)
So, I spoke with a couple of people who are connecting
some interesting dots
between temperature variation
and an illness like COVID-19.
When you get sick,
many of your bodies natural predictable rhythms
start to destabilize.
Your temperature might fluctuate more radically
and it might crank up above your natural range.
That's your body triggering a fever to make itself
less hospitable to viruses or bacteria.
In other words
your body temperature gets anomalous.
That's trouble for you,
but for people tracking COVID,
it's crucial data.
One effort is Kinsa.
A company that tracks the spread of infectious disease
using fevers.
Kinsa sells a smart thermometer that sends your
temperature back to the company every time you take it.
Kinsa says they have about a million thermometers
in circulation.
And with all that data,
they've built a real time health weather map.
It shows possible hot spots of COVID,
counties with more fever then flu season would explain.
- Let's take our real time signal
remove the expected value cold and flu.
What's left over is residual.
That residual is a typical, in this particular
analysis a typical fever clusters.
Things you would not expect.
What we found since that point is that
there's a very high correlation between our hot spots
and COVID-19 cases.
The work is not peer reviewed yet.
And some experts question how reliable it can be
with only a million thermometers.
Their user space could also be biased
by race or class or other factors.
But Kinsa still thinks it can tease out
some interesting trends,
like the effect of social distancing.
Here's their look at Miami-Dade County
in the middle of March.
In 9 days,
the percent of people with a fever
more than doubled.
And around the 17th and 18th,
they started implementing the closure bars.
So it starts going down.
- Other researchers are taking a different attack.
Looking for clues in body temperature that might
predict a fever before it starts.
- One study out of UCFS would collect temperature
and other health data from participants by using a
smart ring.
The rings can measure small changes in body temperature
every minute.
The question is, can tiny temperature rhythms
predict a brewing infections like COVID.
- And so we could pick up with great reliability
those ultranium rhythms, those within a day rhythms,
that there are frequency that tend to tell us about
how stagily your hormones passing along, how synchronized
are they inside of you.
- It's early days for the study
but once smart ring user
who tested positive for COVID has already shared
some interesting data.
- The temperature rhythms that I receive within the day
start to sort of destabilize and amplify
before they have a fever
right up to about 5 days beforehand.
The whole system would look like
it was sort of increasingly like a teeter totter
before they have a fever,
before they felt sick.
- Again that's just one patient.
But with enough data,
the team hopes to build an algorithm
that can sniff out COVID via rhythms like these.
- We will be publishing the findings
we will be putting out, you know,
competition or calls for [Inaudible]
get everybody in the room
let's get this as good as we could possibly get it.
This is really just
how big of a defense can we make.
How quickly to get this into service.
- In the coming months while we take our temperatures
every minute like maniacs
we're going to be hearing a lot more about the effort
to track and predict COVID-19.
Scientists will learn more about how the human body
regulates itself and respond to disease.
And along the way,
we might let go of some assumptions about what's normal
and healthy.
- Obsessing about 98.6 is really false precision right?
Everybody should have a nice daily rhythm of their
temperature.
The only time your temperature is constant is when your dead
and it's room temperature so
thinking about
the patterns of change rather than the absolute number
is much more important.
- Psst cat, go on.
Oh cat get outta there.
Cat [Inaudible]