Verily’s COVID-19 screening site goes live, is already over capacity
From what we can tell, Verily's website is supposed to be the top of this flow chart. [credit: The White House's YouTube channel ]
Google, its sister company Verily, and the US government are teaming up to create two separate information and screening websites for COVID-19. The websites were clumsily announced over the weekend by President Donald Trump and Google public relations, and today the first website, a Verily-developed site for the Bay Area, has gone live.
The announcement of the site was very disorganized and confusing. Normally we would expect Google and the government to have a simultaneous announcement for a project like this, but Google PR seemed to be caught by surprise by Trump's Rose Garden press conference and took two hours to respond to the news on Twitter. When Google did respond to the president's announcement, it disputed the description of a "nationwide" site, saying the site was in the "early stages of development" and that the site would roll out in the Bay Area for testing. A day later, Google communications took a second swing at making a statement, indicating that, actually, two sites were being made by the Alphabet family, one nationwide and one for the Bay Area.
In its second statement, Google communications said that Google, not Verily, would be "partnering with the US government in developing a nationwide website that includes information about COVID-19 symptoms, risk, and testing information." Google said that this nationwide site was "In addition to... work being done by our sister company Verily to launch a pilot website that will enable individuals to do a risk assessment and be scheduled for testing at sites in the Bay Area." A report from The New York Times indicates that this effort is just as improvised behind the scenes as it seems from the outside: the Times reports that Google only started recruiting employees for its project the day before Trump's announcement, and as of Wednesday, Verily's site was described internally by Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai as "a planning effort."
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