Beuy Joob1, Viroj Wiwanitkit2,3. 1. Sanitation1 Medical Academic Center, Bangkok, Thailand. 2. Department of Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil University, Pune, India. 3. Department of Tropical Medicine, Hainan Medical University, Haikou, China.
Dear Editor,COVID-19 is a new emerging coronavirus infection from China which already spread and became public health concern in many countries.[1] Thailand is a country in Southeast Asia in which the disease first appeared outside China.[2] For disease control, the fever screening and history taking on traveling to risk area is the general primary for screening for disease. In the previous report, there is a problem in using temperature screening for COVID-19. Here, the authors would like to share an observation on COVID0-19 in Thailand with special focus on the use of travel history. It is found that disguising on travel history is a big problem that results ineffectiveness of using fever and travel history screening as preventive tool against COVID-19.At present (March 2th, 2020), there are 43 patients with COVID-19 in Thailand. After ruling out the 7 patients with local transmissions, remained patients are from aboard. Of those from aboard, there are 2 interesting cases (4.76%; 95% confidence interval = 1.23%–18.4%), a couple, that the patients disguise the travel history to the physician at the first period of hospitalization. The two cases disguised the history of traveling to Japan where they were infected with COVID-19. The patients further transmitted the disease to their grandson and this situation becomes a local spreading origin. This observation can point that the history taking of travel to risk area can easily get the problem by disguising information provided by the patient. As a corrective action, a specific law was issued in Thailand for preventing disguising information given by the patient. The fine system is implemented as punishment. In conclusion, the basic screening of knowing the travel history to risk area might not be useful and lead to pitfall in disease prevention. Hence, practitioner should recognize that travel history is not useful data for ruling out the disease.