How a Colorado Campus Became a Pandemic Laboratory

Colorado Mesa University and the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard have spent the last year exploring new approaches to managing outbreaks.

One weekend last August, Shynell Moore woke up with a headache and a sore throat. Ms. Moore, then just a few weeks into her junior year at Colorado Mesa University, pulled out her phone and fired up a symptom-tracking app called Scout. Within seconds of reporting her symptoms, the screen turned red: She might have Covid-19, the app said. She promptly got a call from a school administrator, and before the day was out, she had packed some clothes and her elephant ear fish, Dumbo, and moved into quarantine housing. Her Covid-19 test soon came back positive. Several days into her quarantine period, Ms. Moore took a whiff of Dumbo’s typically malodorous food. “I couldn’t smell it,” she said. “And then I drank some cough syrup, and I couldn’t taste it.” She opened Scout and clicked an option: “Lost taste or smell.”