US Coronavirus Response: Google To Roll Out Virus Prevention Website Different Than What Trump Described

Tech giant Google is set to roll out a nationwide website dedicated to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak but it is vastly different from what President Trump described at a press conference on Friday. Trump had claimed that the website would be used to facilitate testing for the coronavirus.

“Google is helping to develop a website. It’s gonna be very quickly done — unlike websites of the past — to determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location. We have many, many locations behind us, by the way,” Trump said. He also claimed 1,700 engineers were working on this project and they have made “tremendous progress.”

In reality, Google’s nationwide site is much more modest than Trump described.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post Sunday that the site is dedicated to “education, prevention, and local resources nationwide.”

“This includes best practices on prevention, links to authoritative information from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and helpful tips and tools from Google for individuals, teachers and businesses,” Pichai continued. The site will be rolled out with the partnership of the U.S. government.

Apple’s sister company, Verily, is in fact developing a coronavirus screening website, but it is only available for citizens in the San Francisco Bay Area as of now. The website helps citizens determine if they need to be tested and shows them nearing testing facilities.

This website is being developed with the help of California health authorities and state government. The Verily site will be expanded to other parts of California other than San Francisco but it is unclear whether it would be rolled out nationwide.

The confusion about the website led Pichai to reportedly call Trump and apologize. Trump likely misinterpreted the news about the Verily project and thought that it was grander than in reality.

“I want to thank the people at Google and Google Communications because as you know, they substantiated what I said on Friday,” Trump said Sunday. “The head of Google, who is a great gentleman ... called us ... and apologized.”

There are currently over 3,800 cases of coronavirus in the United States, with the death toll standing at about 69 people.