Following a COVID-19 case of a young female student who uploaded her symptoms to an app known as Scout, a campus may have found the best method for virus detection.
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CMU of Covid-19 across the campus, record student contacts, map cases, break chains of viral transmission, and monitor the spread of new variants.
With this system, CMU's 10,000-student campus has been transformed into a real-time epidemiological laboratory, testing creative approaches to pandemic.
Like many educational institutions, C.M.U. also stopped its classes in mid-March 2020. Students were facing the same educational disruption everywhere. However, at C.M.U., administrators were concerned that their students, two-thirds of whom were minority, low-income, or first-generation college students, might be permanently excluded for a semester or more due to online courses.
The decision they made was therefore to have all their students return to the school and find a way to monitor and control the spread of the virus among the students.
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When the students returned in August, Scout became the health passport on campus. Every day, they used Scout to report whether they had Covid-19 symptoms or had recently traveled outside the area. If they had no symptoms and no recent travel, the screen turned green. This green screen was their ticket for entry to various classes, the cafeteria, and other campus buildings. It quickly became a new daily habit for the students. The data was fed into Lookout.
Aside from gathering symptom data, Lookout also pulls hourly results from the university's coronavirus test site. The university, which did not have the resources to test every student each week, had devised a strategy. It asked students to be grouped into family units or «mavilies» that included those they were in contact with more often.
The university randomly selected 250 students to take a coronavirus test each week. But students in certain high-risk groups — such as members of sports teams who often practiced, ate and lived together — were selected more often.
When a student was positive, administrators could use Lookout to see who was in his mavily and any other recent contacts they had reported in Scout. Lookout also displayed a list of each mavily with a recent positive test, as well as any “high-spread” mailies with many recent positive tests. When incidents increased to a mavily, the students went into quarantine.
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Naturally, there were also cases where the students were not completely honest with the data they submitted to the platform. Thus, there were also incidents of a large increase in cases.
The university tripled the size of the contact tracing staff and quadrupled the number of tests they performed.
As the different mavilies presented more cases, the administrators asked all members to follow a modified quarantine procedure until each incident was found. They also encouraged the students to be socially responsible, especially as they were preparing to leave the campus for the Christmas holidays.
Now the university says that with the use of masks in classes, maintaining social distancing, and using the app for student entry into university buildings, no incidents have been detected.
