URBANA — Those who download the new Safer Illinois app may be alarmed when they are notified they have possibly been exposed to COVID-19.
But that’s by design, according to developer Bill Sullivan, based on the recommendations of the University of Illinois’ testing and tracing team to presume everyone could be infected.
“They tell us that the most dangerous time for our community is when tens of thousands of people come into our community the next couple weeks,” Sullivan said. “They argued strenuously that when people return to campus, they should be presumed to be infected.”
People with orange status aren’t allowed into UI buildings and are told to stay at home until tested.
Making this the default status was “supported by campus leadership,” based on a “rich conversation” with “experts across campus,” Sullivan said.
“Our intent here is to be very conservative in an effort to protect the health of the larger community,” he said.
But he acknowledged it could cause alarm.
“We’re updating the safer.illinois.edu website and really hope a lot of people read The News-Gazette,” Sullivan said.
To get a yellow status, which allows entry into campus buildings, app users will need to get a negative test result.
That should be easy for anyone affiliated with the UI, since they have access to its saliva-based test, but isn’t currently possible for people getting tested at places like Market Place Mall or CVS.
The app has a way to manually upload results, but that is currently disabled.
“It’s still focused on people who are students and employees of the university,” Sullivan said. “We’re working to build on this version in a fashion that allows the larger Champaign community to gain that functionality from the app, but we’re not there yet.”
The app is a key part of the UI’s strategy for bringing back students for a mix of in-person and online classes and keeping COVID-19 under control, along with a mask requirement and twice-a-week saliva-based tests for people on campus.
For the app to be effective, UI physicist and COVID-19 modeler Nigel Goldenfeld has said that at least 60 percent of the campus community would need to use it.
“I’m very hopeful that the vast majority of the campus community will download the app,” Sullivan said.
With the app and all of the UI’s other measures, Goldenfeld said that infections could be limited this semester to less than 500 people on campus and no more than 100 at a time.
It uses Bluetooth to anonymously detect random codes from nearby phones. If someone nearby later tests positive, the codes sent from that phone will be compared with codes detected by other phones.
If there’s a match, the person will be notified that they may have been in contact with someone who has the coronavirus.
To keep this system running in the background, the app sends notifications every few minutes and asks for access to a user’s location, despite not collecting it.
“We collect no geolocation data, we do not store any location data, and no location data leaves a person’s phone from this app,” Sullivan said earlier this week.
The app also asks for a photo of a user’s driver’s license, which Sullivan said is used to authenticate people not associated with the UI “in case the app does get wider distribution in Illinois.”
“At the moment, we store only the person’s name, birth month, and photo in the cloud,” he said, and in a future release, not even the photo will be stored in the cloud.
“This is in keeping with our principle of storing only the very minimum amount of data in the cloud,” Sullivan said.
And he said the app would soon be updated to send notifications less frequently.
“We’re working on a solution to that,” Sullivan said. “We expect that to be part of the next release in a couple weeks.”
Further down the road, he hopes to use protocols from Apple and Google that are built into the iPhone and Android operating systems and which would allow the exposure-notification system to run without sending background notifications.
“We’re continuing to have discussions with the state about getting the state’s permission to work with Apple and Google,” Sullivan said. “We remain hopeful that that’s going to happen.”
Earlier this week, he suggested expanding the Safer Illinois app to the entire state, and at a stop in Urbana Thursday, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said he’s interested in the idea.
“We’re certainly looking at it. We’re excited about what they’ve developed,” he said.
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August 14, 2020 at 07:00PM
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Status orange? Do no enter | Coronavirus | news-gazette.com - Champaign/Urbana News-Gazette
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