Against the backdrop of rising COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations nationwide, the start of the school year is quickly approaching — and universities are faced with the high-stakes decision of if and how they are going to bring students back to campus.
Many are looking to technology solutions that can help stop the spread of coronavirus and empower communities to return safely to their daily lives. Covid Watch has built one such tool — a fully anonymous exposure notification app that notifies community members of potential COVID-19 exposure while protecting their privacy.
Last month, Arizona became the first state to begin testing the Covid Watch app through a pilot at the University of Arizona. Home to roughly 60,000 students, faculty, and staff, the Tucson-based university, like nearly every other in the country, has been working continuously on the Herculean task of planning a safe reentry strategy for its bustling campus.
“Our faculty and other researchers continue to step up and find new solutions to this complicated health care issue,” said University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins in a report from the university. “Each solution provides another piece of our reentry strategy, and I am proud our faculty are the first to test this app.”
After Arizona Governor Doug Ducey granted approval for the pilot, the University of Arizona Campus Reentry Task Force then seamlessly integrated testing of the Covid Watch app, in addition to traditional manual contact tracing and self-reporting, as part of the university’s three-tiered “Test, Trace and Treat” program. This multi-layered plan to slow the spread of COVID-19 in their community will also include diagnostic testing, antibody testing, and treatment of those who may have been infected, or have tested positive, for COVID-19.
Covid Watch and the State of Arizona were a natural fit for the first pilot testing partnership; together, they are leading the privacy-first approach in their mutual commitment to never collect personally identifying information. Other states have developed apps based on digital contact tracing that collect personal data, such as contact information or GPS location, like Utah’s Healthy Together and North Dakota’s Care19. Such apps are either for-profit or have been caught mishandling user data and have been called out by privacy groups like the ACLU and EFF, suffering low adoption rates as a result.
Covid Watch can’t mishandle your data because it doesn’t collect any, and as far as privacy goes–it’s inherent to the design–and its mission is shared with the ACLU and EFF. The Covid Watch app is a non-profit, novel technology that builds a fully anonymous app on top of the Google/Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) APIs. The app provides exposure notification alerts to persons who may have been exposed to COVID-19 by using Bluetooth technology to share signals between app users who have come in contact with one another. Think of it as a handshake of sorts — a quick hello, just between phones.
This technology could prove to be an invaluable resource on a crowded college campus, or any location where close contact may be inevitable, even with social distancing measures in place. Let’s say, for example, an app user who takes freshman English in a large lecture hall has tested positive for COVID-19: in a fully anonymous and entirely voluntary series of events that protects the privacy of that student and the health of potentially hundreds of others, they have the ability to help stop the spread of COVID-19. After being tested, the student could then report, if they choose, their positive diagnosis in the app by entering a code received from a verified health authority. Every phone with the app that has been in close contact with that of the student will receive a notification that they may have been exposed to COVID-19 and also information about next steps to take and available resources on campus.
Dr. Joyce Schroeder, head of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Arizona, explained the decision to partner with Covid Watch over competing technologies was made “very carefully and very judiciously,” after the app met a series of “many, many” considerations integral to their team of experts–naming privacy, anonymity, and the ability of the user to enter a positive diagnosis given to them only by a health authority as key factors in the decision.
The potential for statewide deployment was also instrumental in choosing to partner with Covid Watch. If adoption of the app in the UArizona population is high enough, the transmission rate on campus could be lowered by more than half.
“If the testing phase goes well, we plan to launch the app for the entire campus community,” said Dr. Schroeder, as reported by the university. “If enough people in the campus community choose to alert each other of their exposure and follow the general guidance — approximately 56% — community spread can be stopped.” This bodes well for the expected impact on coronavirus spread statewide, with Arizona having one of the highest rates of infection in the country.
The partnership with the University of Arizona has been vitally important to the success of Covid Watch. It allowed us to pilot our app with a trusted research partner, and together with the State of Arizona, to be the first in the United States to deploy an app using the GAEN API. But timing and geography have also made this partnership significant. The launch of the app at UArizona coincides with surging coronavirus cases in the state, and we believe the app could have a huge impact now on slowing the spread of COVID-19 in the campus community and beyond.
We need to continue manual contract tracing, social distancing, washing our hands, and wearing masks; but with cases spiking in a growing number of states across the country, we know we have to amplify our efforts with the power of technology. With Covid Watch, we now have a tool that allows us to fight the virus, across all sectors, without sacrificing yet another freedom — and The University of Arizona is just the beginning. We need your help.
If you are a representative of a university, hospital system, or public health authority that is seeking an exposure notification app solution to augment your manual contract tracing efforts, please visit CovidWatch.org/pilot to schedule a consultation and learn more about using our app in your community.
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