“So why are we bothering?”
Colleges that require virus-screening tech struggle to say whether it works
Before the University of Idaho welcomed students back to campus in the fall, it made a big bet on new virus-screening technology. The university spent $90,000 installing temperature-scanning stations, which look like airport metal detectors, in front of its dining and athletic facilities in Moscow, Idaho. When the system clocks a student walking through with an unusually high temperature, the student is asked to leave and go get tested for COVID-19.
But so far the fever scanners, which detect skin temperature, have caught fewer than 10 people out of the 9,000 students living on or near campus. Even then, university administrators could not say whether the technology had been effective because they have not tracked students flagged with fevers to see if they went on to get tested for the virus.
The University of Idaho is one of hundreds of colleges and universities that adopted fever scanners, symptom checkers, wearable heart-rate monitors and other new COVID-screening technologies this school year. Such tools often cost less than a more validated health intervention: frequent virus testing of all students. They also help colleges showcase their pandemic safety efforts.
But the struggle at colleges to keep the virus at bay has raised questions about the usefulness of the technologies. A New York Times effort has tallied more than 530,000 virus cases on campuses since the pandemic’s start.
One problem is that temperature scanners and symptom-checking apps cannot catch the estimated 40% of people with the coronavirus who do not have symptoms but are still infectious. Temperature scanners can also be wildly inaccurate. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has cautioned that such symptom-based screening has only “limited effectiveness.”
The schools have a hard time saying whether — or how well — the new devices have worked. Many universities and colleges, including prominent research institutions, are not rigorously studying effectiveness.
“So why are we bothering?” said Bruce Schneier, a prominent security technologist who has described such screening systems as “security theater” — that is, tools that make people feel better without actually improving their safety. “Why spend the money?”
More than 100 schools are using a free virus symptom-checking app, called CampusClear, that can clear students to enter campus buildings. Others are asking students to wear symptommonitoring devices that can continuously track vital signs such as skin temperature. Meanwhile, some have adapted the ID card swiping systems they use to admit students into dorms, libraries and gyms as tools for tracing potential virus exposures.
Administrators at Idaho and other universities said their schools were using the new tech, along with policies such as social distancing, as part of larger campus efforts to hinder the virus. Some said it was important for their schools to deploy the screening tools even if they were only moderately useful. At the very least, they said, using services such as daily symptom-checking apps may reassure students and remind them to be vigilant about other measures, such as mask wearing.
Some experts said they were troubled that universities lacked important information that might help them make more evidence-based decisions on health screening.
“It’s a massive data vacuum,” said Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease researcher who is an assistant professor at George Mason University. “The moral of the story is you can’t just invest in this tech without having a validation process behind it.”
Other medical experts said increased surveillance of largely healthy college students seemed unduly intrusive, given that symptom checkers have limited usefulness and the effectiveness of wearable health monitors against COVID-19 is not yet known.
The introduction of campus screening tools has often been bumpy. In the fall, the University of Missouri began requiring all students, faculty and staff to use CampusClear, a free app that asks users about possible symptoms, such as high temperature or loss of smell. Users who say they have no symptoms then receive a “Good to Go!” notification that can clear them to enter campus buildings.
The school initially did not enforce the use of CampusClear at building entrances, however, and some students used the app only infrequently, according to reporting by The Missourian, the campus newspaper. In October, the university began requiring people to show their app passcode to enter certain buildings, such as the student center and library. The university has promoted the app as a tool to help educate students.
But how effective it has been at hindering coronavirus outbreaks on campus is unknown. A spokesman for the University of Missouri said the school was unable to provide usage data on CampusClear — including the number of students who had reported possible symptoms through the app and later tested positive for the virus — requested by a Times reporter.
Bridgewater State University in Bridgewater, Mass., introduced two tools last semester that recorded students’ whereabouts in case they later developed virus infections and administrators needed to trace their contacts. One system logged students’ locations every time they swiped their ID cards to enter campus buildings. The other asked students to scan printed-out QR codes posted at certain locations around campus.
Administrators discovered that the key to hindering coronavirus outbreaks was not technology but simply frequent testing — once a week, for on-campus students — along with contact tracing, said Chris Frazer, executive director of the university’s wellness center.
At Oklahoma State University, in Stillwater, administrators said they had planned to log students’ locations when they used campus Wi-Fi for possible later use in contact tracing. But the school never introduced the system, said Chris Barlow, the school’s health services director, partly because administrators realized that many students had contracted the virus off campus, in situations where public health measures such as mask wearing were not followed.
At the University of Idaho and other schools, administrators described devices such as fever scanners as add-ons to larger campus safety efforts involving student testing and measures like social distancing.
In the fall, for instance, the University of Idaho tested its students for the virus at the beginning and middle of the semester, with some random testing as well. The school also used a wastewater testing program to identify an impending virus outbreak at fraternity and sorority houses, proactively quarantining more than a dozen chapters before cases could spread widely through the community.
“We got out in front of it early,” said C. Scott Green, president of the University of Idaho. “We were able to isolate those that were sick, and we got back under control.”