Trump Lles: Google says they are NOT building a coronavirus screening website
I knew he was talking out his arse when he spewing the lie..
Google is not working with the US government in building a nationwide website to help people determine whether and how to get a novel coronavirus test, despite what President Donald Trump said in the course of issuing an emergency declaration for the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, a much smaller trial website made by another division of Alphabet, Googles parent company, is going up. It will only be able to direct people to testing facilities in the Bay Area.
More than an hour after Trumps press conference, a Google communications Twitter account passed along the following statement from Verily, which is a different company inside the Alphabet corporate umbrella:
Carolyn Wang, communications lead for Verily, told The Verge that the triage website was initially only going to be made available to health care workers instead of the general public. Now that it has been announced the way it was, however, anybody will be able to visit it, she said. But the tool will only be able to direct people to pilot sites for testing in the Bay Area, though Wang says Verily hopes to expand it beyond California over time.
The triage site should be put live within a few days, and it will be hosted at Project Baseline, the Verily website where people can sign up to take part in clinical trials. Thats a seemingly odd place for the triage tool to live, but Wang says that Project Baseline already has certain necessary tools like an informed consent agreement, so it makes sense to put it there.
Google is going to develop a website its going to be very quickly done, unlike websites of the past to determine if a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location, Trump said at the press conference. We have many, many locations behind us, by the way. We cover this country and large parts of the world, by the way. Were not gonna be talking about the world right now, but we cover very, very strongly our country. Stores in virtually every location. Google has 1,700 engineers working on this right now. They have made tremendous progress.
As for the 1,700 Google engineers Trump referenced in the press conference, that appears to be related to a call for volunteers Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai put out in a company-wide memo earlier this week.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/13/despite-trumps-claims-google-isnt-building-the-coronavirus-screening-site-and-its-not-ready/