Thermal scanners are being deployed to detect the virus, but they don’t work.

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Mariposa, Calif. (AP) — Paul L. Vasquez, the burly mountain man whose awestruck reaction upon seeing a double rainbow propelled him to internet stardom and turned him into a folk hero, has died in Central California. He was 57.

Vasquez, who called himself Yosemitebear on social media, died early Saturday at a hospital emergency room, the Mariposa County coroner’s office told the Modesto Bee.

The cause of death has not been released. Vasquez had recently posted on his Facebook page that he had gone to get tested for COVID-19 but learned about another unspecified ailment.

In January 2010, Vasquez posted on YouTube a video shot from his mountainside house of a set of rainbows overlooking the Yosemite valley. He notes in the caption that the camera couldn’t capture the rainbows’ intensity and brightness.

But that wasn’t what led to 46 million views of the video. It was Vasquez’s reaction.

Over the course of the 3-minute video, he repeatedly said “whoa,” laughed and even sobbed as he marveled at the sight of the rainbows.

“It’s a double rainbow all the way across the sky!” he exclaimed.

He went on to ponder: “What does it all mean?”

The video went viral that summer after talk show host Jimmy Kimmel tweeted about it, and it led to appearances on a number of TV shows and commercials for Smartwater, Microsoft and Delta Air Lines.

“His ‘Double Rainbow’ basically wrote the book on what a viral video was,” Vasquez’s friend, Robert Borchard, told the Bee. He called Vasquez an “amazing character” who was always enthusiastic about the world.

As they scrambled last month to find a way to pinpoint infections from the novel coronavirus, officials in Georgia’s Gwinnett County sought help from an unusual source: an Illinois-based seller of redlight traffic cameras.

RedSpeed USA had begun advertising a “fever detector” that it described as fast and accurate, using “ground-breaking technology [to] identify symptoms of illness.” The county of nearly a million people in the Atlanta suburbs, where more than 2,400 have confirmed infections and 87 have died, quickly approved an emergency purchase of four scanners to be installed inside county court and office buildings.

“This may be a preview of how we ‘return to normal,’” the county administrator wrote in internal emails obtained by Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation and reviewed by The Washington Post.

Amid the rush, the county had paid a heavy premium: RedSpeed’s setup, at roughly $30,000 a scanner, cost far more than similar systems sold by established competitors — including the industry leader, FLIR Systems, whose scanners range from $5,000 to $15,000.

Not designed for medical use

Industry experts actively dissuade buyers from using the cameras as “fever detectors,” because they aren’t designed for medical use. RedSpeed’s scanners, technical documents show, had also been made by Zhejiang Dahua Technology Co., a Chinese surveillance-camera company banned by Congress in 2018 from selling to federal agencies, though that prohibition did not apply to local governments.

Companies and communities eager to get back to work have touched off a nationwide gold rush for thermal scanners, which measure the heat on a person’s skin and can be used to estimate whether someone is feverish — a potential sign of the disease caused by the virus, COVID-19.

But industry veterans say the frenzy also is stirring up confusion and leading some small businesses and public officials to spend heavily on cameras without understanding their limitations — namely, that they’re not very good at actually detecting infections.

While the systems can sense elevated skin temperatures, they aren’t precise enough to tell whether someone has a fever or something else: The warmth of a person’s skin is often quite different from their core body heat. People with heavier builds, health conditions or hot flashes can trigger the system’s alarms; so, too, can anyone just walking in from a hot car or parking lot.

Fevers not universal symptom

Many people with COVID-19 infections haven’t actually had fevers: The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last month that as many as 25% of infected people don’t show any symptoms at all. The virus’ stealthy ability to not give itself away while it spreads led university researchers in February to estimate that fever scans and similar screening techniques would overlook more than half of the infected.

Those flaws haven’t stopped companies with names such as Athena Security and Feevr from pitching high-tech “fever detection” systems they say could help make the difference between a safe workplace and a dangerous outbreak.

In a technical presentation sent to Gwinnett County, RedSpeed USA said that its system had been installed at emergency-operations centers and law-enforcement offices in South Florida, that the technology had been “essential to successfully containing the outbreak in China” and that it could provide “confidence that all is being done for community wellbeing.”

An official at RedSpeed USA, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the deal was approved by county leaders and accurately reflected the system’s purchasing, delivery, installation, training and support costs. Gwinnett officials declined to comment.

An executive at Feevr’s parent company, X.Labs, said in a statement that its device is “designed to be used as a screening device, not a medical device” and “represents a front line proactive and precautionary step . . . which when combined with additional measures as dictated by medical professionals can help prevent the spread of an infectious disease.” Athena officials did not respond to requests for comment.

The world’s largest maker of such equipment, Oregon-based FLIR Systems, strongly cautions buyers to understand how the systems are meant to be used. The company has posted online disclaimers that its cameras are not “for medical purposes” and can’t be used “to diagnose the coronavirus” or “find individuals experiencing coronavirus symptoms.”

Prior use

The devices were once bought almost exclusively by military authorities and industrial giants, but an influx of small businesses, public venues and other “nontraditional customers” has fueled a surge in demand, FLIR’s chief executive Jim Cannon said in an interview last week.

FLIR sold more than $100 million worth of scanners that can screen for elevated skin temperatures in the first three months of this year, with sales going either directly to businesses or to resellers who package them under their own brand. But Cannon said he fears the new wave of interest could lead to companies misusing the scanners or looking for medical insights they weren’t built to provide.

“We do have concerns that we see a lot of folks popping up in the marketplace making claims that, frankly, the science can’t support,” he said. “You can’t just take any thermal camera and point it at someone and get an effective screening tool for their surface temperature without tremendous amounts of false alarming . . . . There are a lot of folks that have popped up overnight that we think are marketing solutions that don’t do what they’re intended to do.”

Thermal cameras have traditionally been used for defense and security purposes, not medical screening: Installed for years at border crossings, ports and military bases, they can sense when people or vehicles are approaching, even in hazy weather or after nightfall.

The cameras have been used to speed up the temperature-taking process for security staff who might otherwise have to rely on only no-contact thermometers, taking readings one forehead at a time. Scanners were installed across airports in Asia during the SARS outbreak in 2003 to help monitor for high temperatures among moving crowds, but the move drew criticism from some health researchers over the rollout’s “unproven efficacy.”