Already, though, the extent to which educational institutions are willing to go to get bodies through doors has raised concerns. 

In the US, a liberal arts college in Michigan came under fire last week after it emerged that students would be required to download a contact tracing app, called Aura, which will track the locations of its almost 1,500 students in real-time.

“There’s a line but that’s way over the line,” says Prof Alan Woodward, a cyber security expert at Surrey University. “The big question then is what are you going to do with that data.”

Not only was the app able to track student movements, it would report if a student left the college campus without permission, supposedly increasing the risk they could bring coronavirus onto the site, and revoke their access to buildings and their student ID automatically. If students turned off location tracking on their phones, they could even be suspended.

Woodward adds that such location tracking is a major overstep and was unlikely to yield any useful data about cases. “Saying you know the physical location of Johnny and Timmy and Freddie every second of the day doesn’t tell you anything,” he says. The app was simply gathering unnecessary information about movements that do not lead to close contact or social interactions within one to two meters, invading a users privacy for no good reason.

Some UK institutions are exploring other contact-tracing solutions to keep watch over their students.