Colleges and universities are taking creative measures to reduce COVID-19 spread across their campuses. Some institutions are leveraging technology solutions to screen students, professors and staff to make sure they’re healthy as they enter school buildings.
In general, vaccination rates are high on college campuses, with a high percentage of students and faculty received the vaccine. Many institutions require students and professors to be vaccinated. Seven of the eight Ivy League schools imposed a vaccine mandate, with the exception of Cornell University, which reports a 96 percent vaccination rate. Other Ivy League schools report compliance rates of more than 95 percent with most like Yale and Harvard closer to 100 percent.
But the COVID-19 vaccines aren’t completely foolproof, and some vaccinated people are still contracting the virus across the country. Massachusetts health officials, for instance, reported nearly 3500 new breakthrough cases in a week’s time, accounting for just more than 1 percent of all fully vaccinated people in the state. A New York Times database revealed that more than 260,000 coronavirus cases were linked to colleges and universities in the first five months of 2021 alone.
Administrators and health officials at colleges and universities are understandably concerned, and looking for another layer of protection for students and faculty.
Some schools are using walk-through fever scanners that look like airport TSA metal detectors and symptom checkers to identify students with high temperatures and subsequently send them for testing. Technology providers such as Soter Technologies offer ready-made solutions like the company’s SymptomSense that can detect and analyze external body temperature, respiration rate, heart rate and blood oxygen. Other schools are using self-service options that work with apps and portals. But some schools are tapping their own in-house expertise – their students, researchers and inside IT staff – to come up with screening solutions that not only work to minimize the spread of the virus on campus, but could have applications in other settings as well.
COVID Surveillance Screening Platform. Computer science students and faculty at The Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, N.Y., developed a COVID Surveillance Screening platform in partnership with the St Stony Brook Medicine Information Technology, Division of Information Technology, Employee Health, Clinical Transformation, Project Management, and ADNAS, whose technology powers the COVID Test analysis and provided world-class software for an industrial solution where none existed. The platform uses the concept of pool testing, which a procedure that breaks up the task of identifying the presence of a viral disease by testing groups of specimens and not individual ones, which is a faster way of detecting and screening for viruses.
Screening software. The State University of New York (SUNY) system built software to screen its own employees’ potential COVID-19 symptoms on Microsoft Power Platform. SUNY’s system administration developed a COVID-19 app to screen people in the department for coronavirus symptoms and document whether they remained in the office or left. Additional projects included a Health Status Portal. The technology was then rolled out to all of SUNY’s 64 campuses.
An App for delivering test results. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign developed an app where students, faculty and staff receive test results and a boarding pass-style image indicated a negative COVID test for access to campus building. Users can enable the app to notify them when they’ve been in close proximity to someone who tested positive for the virus through the use of an anonymized Bluetooth scanning system.
Testing and tracing system. When the pandemic first began, in March 2020, Boston University engineers built its own system for testing and tracing that can test up to 6,000 members of the BU community every day, with a test result turnaround time of 24 hours or less. The COVID-19 testing facility was built from scratch by engineering faculty, staff and students. The original goal was to bring people back to the University’s three campuses in the fall of 2020, but the lab continues to screen students today. The BU Clinical Testing Lab uses specialized robots to accelerate testing capacity and deliver results quickly.
For more on what some colleges and universities are doing to control the spread of COVID, see:
Colleges and Universities Find Unique Ways to Reduce COVID Spread