In these days of fibrillation for the COVID-19 pandemic a new statement by the American president Donald Trump linked to the technological world is denied. It is in this case the alleged Google initiative that would have put 1,700 engineers to develop a site with which to be able to perform a screening on the coronavirus: the aim is to allow users to enter their symptoms, check if they are compatible with a contagion and convey people to places close to them in order to perform the test.
These are the words of President Trump:
"I want to thank Google. 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 … Google has 1,700 engineers working on this right now. They have made tremendous progress. "
This new site would have been ready to debut even tomorrow, Sunday 15 March, but the American company promptly denied this indication. Google has specified that such a project it is not currently being worked on by Google but by Verily, a company that is owned by Alphabet which is known as the company that owns Google
"Verily is developing a tool that allows you to sort individuals for Covid-19 testing", this is what the company said in a tweet. However, testing is currently limited to the Bay Area, that is, the region around the city of San Francisco, and it is a preliminary test and development phase.
The laudable initiative is therefore far from being operational: it certainly won't be starting from Sunday and especially not for all the USA but limited to the Bay Area only for an initial test phase. Verily is working on its development and can also count on the voluntary contribution to the project of some Google engineers.