Alphabet soup

Google and Verily clarify their roles in the US coronavirus response [UPDATED 3/15]

The portal, developed by a different Alphabet company, is not ready for national use.

John Timmer – Mar 16, 2020 12:08 AM | 377

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

Over the weekend, details began to emerge regarding how two Alphabet companies will be contributing to the government's efforts to control the spread of the new coronavirus. The news came after the government's Friday announcement that Google would play a central role in coordinating expanded testing for infections—an announcement that seemed to catch the company off guard.

President Trump and his Coronavirus coordinator, Deborah Birx, both indicated that expanded testing would rely on a web portal provided by Google that would gather symptom and exposure information, and recommend testing if appropriate. If so, the software would direct people to a nearby drive-through testing facility with adequate capacity. But within a few hours, the company issued a statement indicating that it was a different company within Google's parent Alphabet that would be providing a portal. That company, Verily, indicated the portal was in early stages, and was planning on testing it in a single area at some point in the future.

According to reporting on the confusion, Google had only asked for volunteers to help with coronavirus issues on Thursday, the day before the White House announcement. There are no indications it had specific plans for the volunteers at that time. Verily, meanwhile, had begun work on a coronavirus project, but it was planned only for California's Bay Area, and was not even ready for testing—in part because so little virus testing infrastructure exists.

Apparently, these facts became confused and inflated by senior members of the Trump administration, and the inflated version generated enough enthusiasm that it played a central role in Friday's announcement.

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Since then, both companies have changed their plans and made new announcements. In a blog post from Verily, it announced a web portal for California residents would go live on Monday, and seemingly does match the description of an electronic triage that will determine who should get tested and coordinate their testing. The company, however, says that some of its features may not be ready by tomorrow: "The program is in its early stages, and we will take the time to assess operations at pilot sites in the Bay Area before rolling out to additional sites. "

Google, for its part, announced that it would be partnering with the federal government to create a different web service, one that would provide a clearinghouse of information on it, but not coordinate testing. In an accompanying blog post, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet elaborated on the project, and placed it in the context of the company's other efforts. In addition to the information-focused website, the company will be placing some information on its home page, increasing the moderation of misinformation on YouTube, and tweaking maps to better handle the closure of many businesses and services in response to the pandemic.

All of these are welcome efforts. But it's clear that, even if the US' testing capacity ramps up as dramatically as promised, we're going to have to wait to have a website that can ensure that the expanded capacity is matched to the people who need it most.

Original coverage follows:

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, 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.

But it wasn't simply Trump who failed to have a grip on the facts. Dr. Birx was brought on to elaborate on the government's planned response, and said that Google would have a central role in it. "We wanted to also announce this new approach to testing," she said, "which will start in this screening website facilitated by Google." The website would supposedly ask users about risk factors and symptoms, determine if a test is warranted, and then direct them to a nearby drive-through testing center.

Problems start with the fact that Google isn't involved in this. Instead, a different Alphabet company, Verily, is working on a portal. This makes more sense, given that Verily is focused on medical-oriented computing, both in terms of analyzing data for large healthcare providers, and in terms of providing services and hardware for individual patients. And it at least has the same corporate parent as Google, which presumably explains the confusion about who's building the software.

But the Verily statement (which was issued by Google communications) indicates that there are a number of other issues in the plans presented by the administration today. The statement reads in full:

We are developing a tool to help triage individuals for Covid-19 testing. 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. We appreciate the support of government officials and industry partners and thank the Google engineers who have volunteered to be part of this effort.

So, while there may be some Google engineers volunteering to help out with the project, it's being developed by a company that, as of two years ago, had a total head count that was less than a third of the 1,700 engineers claimed by Trump. The website is not even ready for use for a single region in one state, much less ready to become a central part of the government's strategy of allocating the millions of tests it announced would be available in the near future.

As of this report, the administration had not not clarified what its actual plan is. Given that key figures in devising said plan were acting as if this portal were ready for use just a few hours ago, it may take them some time to develop one.

Listing image: Drew Angerer / Getty Images

John Timmer Senior Science Editor

John is Ars Technica's science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

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