The fall of 2020 will go down as a period of profound experimentation at colleges and universities. They are trying out wastewater tests, dozens of health-check apps and versions of homegrown contact technologies that log student movement and exposure risk.
And they are experimenting with different testing methods that might yield faster results and be easier to administer, such as using saliva instead of nasal swabs.
Like small island nations with discrete populations, many universities are using methods that cities, states and nations often cannot. The colleges have some authority over relatively captive communities, which are made up of students largely at ease with new technology. Plus, the schools have profound motivation: Their economic survival depends on people getting to campus safely.
College officials are also hoping that students will be motivated to make it work. Excessive risky behavior that could lead to a rise in new cases might cause campuses to close, sending students home to their parents' basements and couches.
Thousands of positive cases have already been reported on scores of newly reopened campuses. The danger may be less to the students themselves and more to vulnerable people in their families, among college workforces and in surrounding communities.
"The third wave is going to be these kids," said Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who advises universities and other major institutions about the coronavirus. The first wave, he said, centered on New York City, and the second on the South and the Southwest.
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Rutherford said schools would nonetheless be able to consider their experiments a success if they managed to keep their case prevalence below those of their surrounding communities.
The schools argue that their efforts could have a much broader effect: These trial-and-error experiments could seed technologies to help the rest of society cope with the pandemic.
"There's an analogy to Facebook's rollout," said Joanna Masel, a mathematical biologist and professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. "We're starting on college campuses. It is useful to focus on these communities and on places where there is trust, achieve high uptake and spread from there."
To that end, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have shown interest in Masel's pioneering contribution to the contact tracing and exposure app being deployed at the University of Arizona. The app, known as Covid Watch and developed on a platform built by Apple and Google, anonymously tracks students' movements using Bluetooth technology; those who download the app will be notified if they have been in proximity to someone who has tested positive.
Masel built in an algorithm that seeks to gauge how infectious a student was at the time contact was made with others -- a determination made by looking at when symptoms first appeared. Using that data, the algorithm can calculate how much risk was posed to other students depending on when they were exposed to the infected student and for how long. Students at the highest risk of exposure will be asked to quarantine and get tested.
To grapple with the privacy implications, the university has made use of the app voluntary. The information is kept on personal devices -- phones or watches or other Bluetooth-enabled technology -- and the users are the ones who would permit a positive test to be shared, with their identities kept secret.
The more students who sign up, the more the university, which has also bought 27,000 thermometers and many thousands of masks, hopes it will be able to head off outbreaks.
Versions of the app that do not bake in Masel's extra algorithm have been introduced at the University of Alabama and the University of Virginia. Other colleges are exploring related technology developed by the MIT Media Lab, said Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at the lab.
"We've talked to about 50 colleges and universities," Raskar said, adding that the MIT technology, called PathCheck, is being pilot tested by at least three schools: Vassar College, Southern Methodist University and Texas Christian University.
Raskar said colleges and universities were far ahead of local and state governments in adopting or experimenting with exposure-notification technology and other advanced tactics to fight the coronavirus.
"All of them are trying different innovations, different ideas, home-brew solutions," he said.