President Trump told the nation in a press conference today today that Google has 1,700 engineers building a website to help detect coronavirus and facilitate country-wide testing. That’s news to Google, which quickly clarified the situation on Twitter.
Google is just one company in the Alphabet holding company.
Apparently a different Alphabet subsidiary called Verily is working on a small-scale Bay-area website for COVID-19 pre-testing triage. The as-yet-unreleased site will help people understand if they should get tested, and then direct them to appropriate facilities.
Get the full story in my post at Forbes …
Also, if you’ve heard that the Google site is now being expanded and President Trump is claiming that reports of Google being surprised by the announcement were fake news, please note the screenshot in the article of Google’s PR announcement. To go deeper, read Russel Brandom’s excellent article in The Verge.
Hopefully needless to say: presidential announcements at a time of crisis should be correct.