Enlarge / Dr. Deborah Birx points to a block labeled "Screening Website," showing its centrality to the plan for coronavirus testing. It later emerged that the website isn't even ready for local testing. (credit: Drew Angerer / Getty Images)
During today's press conference in which he declared the new coronavirus to be a national emergency, President Trump announced that Google was developing software that would be central to the US' containment strategy. Trump, along with Dr. Deborah Birx, a key official in the administration's Coronavirus Response Coordinator, said that Google's Web portal would be central to the process of helping US residents take advantage of a promised expansion of the country's testing capacity.
Two hours later, however, Google communications felt compelled to issue a statement saying that nearly everything about this is either not quite right or badly mistaken. The portal is being done by a different company, and isn't even ready for testing in the single location it's planned for: California's Bay Area.
Google's role in the process was mentioned twice, first by Trump himself, who said, "Google is helping to develop a website. It's 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." He went on to claim that Google currently had 1,700 engineers working on the project right now.
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