Protecting older Americans from coronavirus
Sutter Health internal medicine physician Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider joins ‘The Daily Briefing.’
Alphabet's Verily has finally launched the pilot for its COVID-19 screening website after President Trump announced on Friday that Google was working with the Trump administration on a project to aid in the coronavirus pandemic.
The site, limited in scope and only available in the Bay Area, requires a user to use their Google log-in. The person must be at least 18 years old, speak English, be a resident of the U.S. and "willing to sign COVID-19 Public Health authorization form," according to the website.
"The tool will triage people who are concerned about their COVID-19 risk into testing sites based on guidance from public health officials and test availability," Verily wrote in a blog post, accompanying the website.
President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference about the coronavirus in the Rose Garden of the White House on Friday. Shortly after, he tweeted that he has declared Sunday, March 15 a National Day of Prayer. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
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The post adds that Californians will be able to take an online COVID-19 screener survey through the website and then directed to a mobile testing site, where they will learn of their results "within a few days."
The questions that are asked include whether a person is experiencing a severe cough, shortness of breath and other symptoms generally associated with the virus. If a person answers "yes," the website "based on your symptoms, in-person COVID-19 testing through this program is not the right fit" and suggests that they seek in-person medical attention.
The website, which launched a day earlier than initially stated, came after confusion at a Friday press conference, where Trump said that Google and many of its engineers were working on a website. According to Wired, the tech giant did not expect Trump to say anything and had not planned to build a website.
Following the confusion, Google Communications' Twitter account posted a series of tweets in an attempt to clarify.
"Statement from Verily: 'We are developing a tool to help triage individuals for Covid-19 testing," Google Communications wrote. "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."
Trump later retweeted those tweets, calling out the "fake and corrupt" news.
A Google spokesman pointed Fox News to its tweets, as well as the Verily blog post and Google CEO Sundar Pichai's blog post on the topic.
In conjunction with Verily's pilot website, Pichai wrote a blog post on Sunday stating the tech giant would launch a website that would help people find information about COVID-19.
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"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 wrote in the post. "We’ll be rolling out an initial version of the website late Monday, March 16, and we’ll continue to enhance and update it with more resources on an ongoing basis."
There have been 164,470 reported cases of COVID-19, including at least 3,700 in the U.S.
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