Coronavirus Testing Website Goes Live and Runs Into Confusion

Once deemed eligible and depending on availability, people will be directed to a mobile testing center run by Verily in conjunction with local health officials. The actual coronavirus test will be a nasal swab conducted by nurses and nurse practitioners with oversight from the company’s clinical research staff. The test results will be sent to the person via email.

Ms. Wang said the testing sites have appointments scheduled for Monday, although she declined to say how many tests were being performed. As more testing sites come online, the program aims to cover the entire state, Verily said.

Verily said it needed people to create or sign into a Google account so they could collect the answers to the screening, contact the individual for testing and send results to them. The company said it would not combine the data from the program with other information collected by Google.

The website has been mired in controversy from the start. In a news conference on Friday, Mr. Trump said Google had 1,700 engineers working on the project, claiming that the company had made great progress.

The website was actually the work of Verily and Sundar Pichai, Alphabet’s chief executive. Mr. Pichai said “a planning effort” was underway in an internal memo a day before the White House news conference. The project was limited to the Bay Area and the 1,700 engineers hailed by Mr. Trump appeared to be the number of Google employees who had volunteered to help Verily.

A Verily spokeswoman has said there is no current timetable for a national rollout of its screening program. The website became publicly available one day before a Monday deadline that Verily had announced.

Separate from Verily’s efforts, Google announced that it was working on a “nationwide website” to provide information on virus symptoms and testing sites. The company had made no mention of that project on Friday when it directed all inquiries about Mr. Trump’s website announcement to Verily.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/technology/coronavirus-testing-website-google.html