Dubai manufacturer bulds 'sanitation gates'

In a Dubai industrial park, workers weld, drill and build what one entrepreneur sees as key to the near-future of this desert city-state amid the coronavirus pandemic: disinfection gates.

Husam Zammar's company builds such gates for government and commercial clients.

He believes the new safety measures will find wide acceptance, just as metal detectors did after the 9/11 terror attacks.

That fear pervades many in Dubai and elsewhere across the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven emirates whose population is some 90% foreigners.

Yet even as confirmed coronavirus cases spike, the UAE is opening up its cavernous malls and restaurants in a gamble to stimulate its economy while still trying to fight off the pandemic.

That's led to a new normal here of temperature checks, social distancing monitors at supermarkets and marked-off empty seats on the city's driverless metro.

But the detection rate for cases continues to spike amid a mass testing campaign that authorities say has seen over 1 million tests administered.

So far, the UAE has reported over 11,300 confirmed cases of the virus with 89 deaths.

The UAE isn't yet like Wuhan, China, from which the first cases of the virus emerged.

There, biosecurity checkpoints are everywhere that spray people with disinfectant or have them walk through a box of grey decontaminant gas like an airlock.

Hoping to in part fill an anticipated demand in the UAE, Zammar's firm Guard Sanitiser constructs gates out of metal frames, galvanised steel and temperature-checking equipment from China.

Someone trying to enter a business or office with one-first must undergo a temperature check, then walk through a fog of disinfectant created ultrasonically.

While that won't detect an asymptomatic carrier of the coronavirus, that will offer people peace of mind, said Zammar, a Syrian entrepreneur based in Dubai.

Images from Zammar's gate or a helmet-based temperature checker now used by Dubai police could also be fed into a facial-recognition database.

The UAE already has such a database from its national ID card system, which residents use for fast immigration clearance at Dubai International Airport.

That fuels worries about privacy and surveillance in the UAE, which has been internationally criticised for targeting journalists and human rights activists and was linked to a suspected spying app.