UPDATED: Donald Trump claimed Google was assisting in the U.S. government’s efforts to address the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak by developing a site that would point Americans to locations they could get tested. But there were several inaccuracies in what Trump announced Friday at a press conference, as Google later clarified.
First, the project is not being carried out by Google per se, but by Verily — the life sciences division of Alphabet, which is Google’s parent company. Moreover, the coronavirus tool is in “early stages of development” with a test slated to roll out initially in the San Francisco Bay Area, not broadly across the U.S.; at some point, Verily said, it may expand the tool more widely.
In a statement following Trump’s remarks, Verily said, “We are developing a tool to help triage individuals for Covid-19 testing. Verily is in the early stages of development, and planning to roll testing out in the Bay Area, with the hope of expanding more broadly over time. We appreciate the support of government officials and industry partners and thank the Google engineers who have volunteered to be part of this effort.”
Trump inaccurately characterized Google’s participation in the coronavirus response as part of his remarks declaring an national emergency and committed to $50 billion in funding to respond to the coronavirus pandemic. He claimed that “Google has 1,700 engineers working on this right now. They’ve made tremendous progress. Our overriding goal is to stop the spread of the virus and help all Americans impacted by this.”
Trump said that “Google is helping to develop a website, it is going to 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.” It’s unclear what “websites of the past” he was referring to.
There were no executives from Google or Verily at the White House’s press conference Friday.
CNBC reported that Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent a memo to employees Thursday in which he said Verily was working with government officials to point high-risk individuals to Project Baseline, a service set up to make it “easy and engaging for people to contribute to the map of human health and participate in clinical research.” According to Pichai’s memo, the Baseline site would direct people who need to be tested for coronavirus to “testing sites based on the latest guidance from public health authorities.”
Verily was initially going to make access to the Baseline site available only to health care workers, but it will now open the site to the general public — but again, for now, it will only refer visitors to testing facilities in the Bay Area.