Trump Says Google Will Quickly Launch National Coronavirus Website; Silicon Valley Giant Says Not So Fast
SANTA CLARA (CBS SF) -- Hours after President Donald Trump announced Google would be "very quickly" launching a national website to distribute the latest information on coronavirus testing, the Silicon Valley giant thanked him for his support but clarified the roll out would be slower than he promised and focused first on the Bay Area.
In a Friday speech to the nation, Trump said: "Google is going to develop a website — it's 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."
Officials at Verily -- the division of Google/Alphabet in charge of building the website -- took to social media Friday night posting on Twitter that the tool will first target the growing coronavirus outbreak in the San Francisco Bay Area.
"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."
Google is headquartered in the local epicenter of the outbreak. Dr. Sara Cody, the Santa Clara County's director of public health, said at a Friday news that the county has 79 confirmed cases, 37 people are hospitalized, and 43 cases were contracted from community transmission, not travel. The county reported its second death on Friday.
"Based on these data and patterns of disease that we see around the world, we know that the outbreak of COVID-19 in our county will continue to accelerate and we anticipate many, many more cases in the days and weeks to come."
In response to request for further comment by the tech online news posting site Verge, Carolyn Wang, communications lead for Verily, told them that the triage website was initially only going to be made available to health care workers instead of the general public.
The tool will now be open to the general public, Wang said, but in its early from it will only be able to direct people to "pilot sites" for testing in the Bay Area. Then a later rollout would expand it to California and then the nation beyond.