Colleges that need a coronavirus technology screening are struggling to tell if it works

Before the University of Idaho welcomed students back to campus last year, it made a big bet on new virus screening technology.

The university spent $ 90,000 on installing temperature-scanning stations, which look like airport metal detectors, in front of its dining and athletics facilities in Moscow, Idaho. When the system clocks a student with an exceptionally high temperature, the student is asked to leave for Covid-19.

But so far, the fever scanners, which detect skin temperature, have caught less than ten people out of the 9,000 students living on or near campus. Even then, university administrators could not say whether the technology was effective because they did not detect fever-stricken students to see if they had been tested for the virus.

The University of Idaho is one of hundreds of colleges and universities that have used fever scanners, symptom testers, portable heart rate monitors, and other new Covid screening technologies this school year. Such instruments often cost less than a more valid health intervention: regular virus testing of all students. They also help colleges to showcase their security efforts in pandemics.

But the struggle among many colleges to stop the virus has raised questions about the usefulness of the technologies. A New York Times effort has recorded more than 530,000 virus cases on campuses since the start of the pandemic.

One problem is that temperature scanners and symptom control applications cannot reach the estimated 40 percent of people with the coronavirus who have no symptoms but are still contagious. Temperature scanners can also be very inaccurate. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned that such symptom-based screening has only ‘limited effectiveness’.

The schools are struggling to say whether – or how well – the new devices worked. Many universities and colleges, including prominent research institutes, do not study efficiency.

“Then why do we bother?” says Bruce Schneier, a leading security technologist who described such screening systems as ‘safety theater’, ie instruments that make people feel better without improving their safety. “Why spend the money?”

More than a hundred schools use a free app symptom monitoring program called CampusClear, which enables students to enter campus buildings. Others ask students to wear symptoms monitoring devices that can continuously detect vital signs such as skin temperature. And some have adapted the ID card swipe systems they use to allow students into dormitories, libraries and gyms as tools to detect potential exposure to viruses.

Administrators from Idaho and other universities said their schools are using the new technology, along with policies such as social distance, as part of larger efforts to prevent the virus. Some have said that it is important for their schools to use the selection tools, even if they are only moderately useful. At the very least, they said the use of services such as daily application of symptoms for students can reassure students and remind them to be vigilant about other measures, such as wearing a mask.

Some public health experts said it was understandable that colleges did not evaluate the effectiveness of the technology against the coronavirus. They said that schools, after all, are not used to regularly examining their entire campus population for new infectious diseases.

Yet some experts have said they are concerned that universities do not have important information that could help them make more evidence-based decisions about health examinations.

“This is a big data vacuum,” said Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist of infectious diseases who is an assistant professor at George Mason University. “The moral of the story is that you can not just invest in this technology without having to go through a validation process.”

Other medical experts said that greater oversight of largely healthy college students seems unnecessarily intrusive, as symptom monitors are limited and that the effectiveness of portable health monitors against Covid-19 is not yet known.

The introduction of campus research tools was often bumpy. Last fall, the University of Missouri began requiring all students, faculties, and staff to use CampusClear, a free app that asks users about possible symptoms, such as high temperature or odor loss. Users who say they have no symptoms then get ‘Good to Go!’ notice they can clear to enter campus buildings.

The school initially did not enforce the use of CampusClear at building entrances, and some students rarely used the app, according to a report by The Missourian, the campus newspaper. In October, the university begins requiring people to show their app password to enter certain buildings, such as the student center and the library. The university promoted the app as a tool to train students.

But how effective it was at curbing coronavirus outbreaks on campus is unknown. A Missouri University spokeswoman said the school could not provide the usage data on CampusClear – including the number of students who reported possible symptoms through the app and were later tested positive for the virus – which a Times reporter requested has.

Jason Fife, Ivy.ai’s marketing director at the start of CampusClear, said nearly 425,000 people at about 120 colleges and universities used the app in the past semester, generating about 9.8 million user reports. Many schools, he noted, use data from the app not to track individual virus cases, but to look for symptom trends on their campuses.

However, Ivy.ai cannot measure the effectiveness of the app as a virus screening tool, he said. For privacy reasons, the company does not detect individual users who report symptoms and later test positive for the infection.

At some universities, administrators acknowledged that the technology they had adopted this school year could not break out the way they had hoped.

Bridgewater State University in Bridgewater, Mass., Last semester introduced two instruments that indicated students’ whereabouts if they would later develop viral infections and need administrators to track their contact. One system recorded students’ locations each time they swiped their ID cards to enter campus buildings. The other one asked students to scan QR codes affixed at certain locations on campus.

By the end of the semester, only about a third of the 1,200 students on campus had scanned the barcodes. Ethan Child, a senior at Bridgewater, said he scanned the QR codes but also skipped when walking past in the rain.

“I think it’s fair to ask students to do it – whether they are going to do it is another matter,” he said. “People might just pass it by.”

Administrators have discovered that the key to the outbreak of coronavirus outbreaks was not technology, but simply regular testing – once a week – for students on campus, as well as contact tracing, said Chris Frazer, executive director of the university’s wellness center. said.

“I am glad that we did not spend too much money” on technological instruments, said Dr. Frazer said. “We have found that tests and more tests are needed.”

The location detection tools were ultimately the most useful for ‘peace of mind’, he added, and to confirm the findings of contact detectives, who often learned much more about infected students’ activities by calling them than by examining their location files.

Other schools that have discovered that location detection was not a handy security tool for pandemics have decided not to use it at all.

At Oklahoma State University, in Stillwater, administrators said they intended to report students’ locations when they used Wi-Fi on campus for later use in contact detection. But the school never introduced the system, said Chris Barlow, director of the school’s health services, in part because administrators realized that many students contracted the virus off campus, in situations where social measures such as wearing a mask not followed.

At the University of Idaho and other schools, managers have described devices such as fever scanners as complements to larger campus safety efforts that include student tests and measures such as social distance.

Last fall, for example, the University of Idaho tested its students for the virus at the beginning and middle of the semester, using some randomized tests. The school also used a wastewater testing program to identify a looming virus outbreak in fraternal and sorority homes, and proactively quarantined more than a dozen chapters before matters could spread widely throughout the community.

“We came out early for that,” said C. Scott Green, president of the University of Idaho. “We were able to isolate the sick, and we regained control.”

Yet there was hiccup. The university requires food service workers who worked at the dining hall to undergo temperature checks using hand scanners. But several developed viral infections anyway, and the university had to temporarily close the dining hall over a weekend for deep cleaning.

As for the free-standing temperature scanner stations, Mr. Green himself experienced their limitations. He said one wrongly prevented him from entering an athletics building after getting out of a hot car.