President Donald Trump has announced that Google is in collaboration with the American government to develop a website that will help streamline testing for COVID-19.
Speaking at a press conference, Trump added that the website will “determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location.”
However, it seems that the 45th president of the United States was not telling the whole truth. According to Trump, 1,700 Google engineers were working on the website and it will be “very quickly done, unlike websites of the past.”
Google’s statement via Verily, a life science research organisation under its parent company Alphabet, suggests otherwise.
The statement admits to “developing a tool to help triage individuals for Covid-19 testing” in its “early stages”. It is not clear how that aligns with Trump’s statement that the project would be done ‘very quickly’. It also confirms some Googlers were volunteering for the project.
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Google then later posted a tweet with a similar message from one of its Twitter handles.
Statement from Verily: “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.
— Google Communications (@Google_Comms) March 13, 2020
Website for the Bay Area, not the entire country
According to Google, the website isn’t even for the entire country but only for San Francisco’s Bay Area. The verge also made a report stating the website wasn’t even intended to be public. Instead, it would be used by health officials as a triage site.
But Trump in his press conference said:
“We have many, many locations behind us, by the way. We cover this country and large parts of the world, by the way. We’re 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.”
This statement is not true.
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