Arizona State University adopts blockchain-based app to track COVID-19

Open The New York Times' rolling survey of coronavirus cases on United States college campuses, and the picture looks bleak: As of Nov. 5, over 252,000 cases had been confirmed across 1,600 colleges nationwide.

The spread of infection, combined with an at best incompetent and at worst cynical and exploitative policy toward college students and staff has resulted in university communities facing stringent quarantines in unsafe accommodations or being summarily sent home.

With over 2,500 reported cases as of Nov. 5, Arizona State University is, at present, among the harder-hit colleges in the country - just over 50 colleges have reported 1,000 cases over the course of the pandemic, according to The New York Times.

ASU is now using the testing-and-health-status app "HealthCheck," which was designed by Safe Health Systems, or SHS, a partner of Mayo Clinic.

HealthCheck is powered by a digital health platform called SAFE, which was developed during the Mayo Clinic and ASU Health Care MedTech Accelerator program.

The platform generates digital health IDs and an auditable log of all events, which will, for HealthCheck, be verified and stored using the Hedera Consensus Service.

The use of these technologies aims to ensure that sensitive health data is kept private and that data-reporting is accurate and accountable.

A handful of U.S. colleges have notably had significant success with launching in-house surveillance testing programs that randomly test students, regardless of whether they display symptoms.

These programs have placed less of an emphasis on data privacy, but their ambitious approach to widespread, random testing has ensured that these colleges are expecting to maintain in-person learning throughout the fall and spring semesters.

As a Cointelegraph report has clarified, privacy concerns do remain, even for blockchain solutions such as HealthCheck, due to their data integrations and partnerships with external medical labs.