The Power to Stop COVID-19 In the Palm of Your Hand

The University of Arizona and Covid Watch, a nonprofit organization co-founded by Tina White ’07 ’09, launched a customized coronavirus exposure notification app for the campus community in August. It now has nearly 42,000 downloads. 

“I am very proud of our partnership with Covid Watch, which allows us to prioritize privacy while using this incredible technology for exposure alerts,” says Robert C. Robbins, UArizona president. “I hope our entire campus community takes advantage of this resource. The more people who use it, the safer we will be.”

The app sends exposure alerts without collecting any personally identifying information from users. According to UArizona researchers, the app calculates a person’s level of exposure risk by assessing the duration and distance of exposure to an infected person as well as the point in the infection arc at which the user was exposed.

If users are notified of risk, they are told whether to quarantine and for how long, what symptoms to monitor, how to reach a manual contact tracer, and how to connect with Campus Health to schedule a test or be seen for symptoms.

“We will continue to collaborate on the development of our crowdsourced technology solution to provide the campus population with new tools to beat COVID-19,” says Tina White, Covid Watch executive director. White graduated from UArizona with a bachelor of science and a master of science in aerospace engineering.

Download the Covid Watch app.