Over the summer, as Kansas was seeing a rise in COVID-19 cases, its state university was plotting a way to keep transmission down on campus. While the majority of the University of Kansas was still locked down, its administrators decided to open up labs and research buildings, the contents of which could not be accessed online, to 1,000 staff and researchers.
To open these buildings safely, the university worked with a nonprofit called CVKey Project to pilot a symptom-checking app among a small group of staff that needed to access research archives and laboratories. The app would review symptoms and either clear users to go into school or direct them to stay home and contact a health professional for further guidance. Now, the University of Kansas is preparing to roll out the CVKey app to its student population of nearly 30,000 for entry into 266 buildings across campus.
Unlike many symptom-checking apps, CVKey has roots in Silicon Valley. It was founded by Brian McClendon, the cocreator of the technology that would become Google Earth. While a VP at Google, he worked on Google Maps, Google Earth, and Google Street View for nearly 11 years before leaving to become Uber’s VP of Maps in 2015. When the coronavirus hit, McClendon launched CVKey Project to build technology for curbing COVID-19 transmission.
“I’m deeply concerned about the economic impact of COVID, and ‘reopening responsibly’ is a critical part of that,” McClendon says. “What can I do [in software] to help reopening be more successful?”
He’s now implementing that technology at his alma mater, the University of Kansas, where he holds a teaching position. But in designing and launching his first public health product, he’s had to contend with Silicon Valley’s history of data siphoning that has fostered a public paranoia about surveillance technology.
The app, created with input from a brain trust that includes former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, asks the user if they’ve recently tested positive for COVID-19, come into contact with someone who has, or been in proximity to a COVID-19 outbreak. It then offers up a list of symptoms and asks if the user has experienced any of them. If a person says yes to even one of those symptoms—such as a headache—the app tells them to see a healthcare provider and does not generate the QR code that would give them entry to school buildings.
In the pilot phase, users had to scan their code with an attendant at the door to the building they were trying to enter. But paying a person to stand at the door for every building all day was expensive, so CVKey has since installed kiosks. However, the attendant provided an added layer of pressure because they could stop people and remind them to scan their code. By comparison, the kiosks cannot stop a person from entering or even catch a person who forgot to scan. In addition, most of the CVKey kiosks are actually located inside buildings, and the school employs a separate key card system that lets student swipe into buildings. McClendon is hoping that students themselves will act as enforcement and speak up when they see someone glide by without checking in.
“Peers help you do the right thing, because you have to scan in and your peers are scanning in themselves and will know when you’re not doing that,” says McClendon. He adds that the purpose of the app is really to get people to self-evaluate every day. There are also protections in place to guard against people who try to use an old QR code or one generated for someone else. The codes expire and are replaced with new ones at a frequent rate, McClendon says.
Since this app is largely a symptom checker, it will not catch asymptomatic cases, which the CDC estimates are 40% of COVID-19 infections. For that reason, the University of Kansas is requiring students to wear masks, asking them to remain six feet apart, and putting hand sanitizer dispensers in hallways. Students must get tested before arriving on campus. The Watkins Health Center will also offer ongoing COVID-19 testing services. For contact tracing new cases, the center is working with the local public health department.
McClendon says when he spoke to the University of Kansas’s student body president, all of his questions were around privacy and security. He says the app is designed specifically to defuse these concerns, but he is also being transparent about how it works. Gaining student trust will be important especially as the app evolves to incorporate other functions. For example, McClendon’s team is working on giving kiosks the ability to scan faces and check for masks.
“I think in general for all campuses, KU included, to be able to go back and stay open, the spread of the disease needs to be kept low,” he says. Getting students to slowly trust an app enough to engage with it every day to check for symptoms can pave the way for even more robust public health efforts at schools, he says.
“This combined with masks, combined with contact tracing, combined with more testing—if you do all of it, I think there’s a hope that we can reopen responsibly.”