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The Internet Google Medicine United States

Google Is 'Helping To Develop' Website For Coronavirus Testing, Trump Says (theverge.com) 83

Posted by BeauHD from the broken-promises dept.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday declared a national emergency over the fast-spreading coronavirus. In addition to providing about $50 billion in federal aid to fight the disease and temporarily suspending interest on student loans, Trump said Google is "helping to develop" a website that will help users determine if testing is needed and where the nearest testing location is.

Trump said the search engine giant has 1,700 engineers at work to build the website. "Users will be directed to fill out a questionnaire, including detailing any symptoms, and if deemed necessary they will be directed to a nearby drive-thru test site that the U.S. government is preparing to roll out across the country," reports Business Insider. It's not yet clear when this website will launch, but Trump said Google has already "made tremendous progress."

UPDATE: Despite what President Trump said, Google is not working with the U.S. government in building such a website. "Instead, a much smaller trial website made by another division of Alphabet, Google's parent company, is going up," reports The Verge. "It will only be able to direct people to testing facilities in the Bay Area."

Since it was announced the way it was, anybody will be able to visit it but the website will only be able to direct people to "pilot sites" for testing in the Bay Area, though the hope is to expand it beyond California "over time." "As for the 1,700 Google engineers Trump referenced in the press conference, that appears to be related to a call for volunteers Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai put out in a company-wide memo earlier this week," adds The Verge.
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Google Is 'Helping To Develop' Website For Coronavirus Testing, Trump Says More

Google Is 'Helping To Develop' Website For Coronavirus Testing, Trump Says

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  • 1700 if you're google apparently...

    • Depends. How much money do you have and how quickly does it have to be spent

      I once went to a meeting at a state public health department which blew a million dollar west Nile virus grant on a web site where the public could report the location of dead birds. It wasn't that they were stupid, the federal money bomb grant came with such a short fuse the only thing they had time to do with it was to toss the hot potato to a contractor that was set up to absorb large amounts of federal cash quickly.

    • It also takes until Sunday night somehow. Can't 1,700 people code quicker than that? Or does it not really go quicker the more bodies you throw at a problem?
    • Did the man at 1600 - which is a big number - just admit that Google has a bigger number?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      It's a bit more complicated. There are tons of regulations. You can't just put it in Google sheets, millions of people will be hitting it simultaneously, so it needs to scale, it will have tons of personal and medical info, so it needs to be secure, comply with HIPAA regulation, comply with state privacy and medical regulations for all 50+ states (you can be guaranteed, that CA and NY will lob huge lawsuits at this the minute the Trump administration puts this site online), it'll probably need plugins to in

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      I wonder if anyone told Google that they were doing this . . .

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        Nope, apparently not. Google isn't building a web site, a different Alphabet subsidiary is. There aren't 1700 web developers, the company only has 400 employees. Their web site will only cover the San Francisco Bay Area. The web site is barely started.

        So absolutely everything that he said was complete and utter Grade A buffalo flop. Aren't you proud to be an American?

    • This is why you need to keep politics - especially US politics - out of this.

    • Let me guess the website will function like:

      Do you have a fever? No: You do not have coronavirus

      YES

      Do you have health insurance? No: We do not want to know if you have coronavirus

      YES

      Please visit XYZ

  • Google just being Google (Score:3)

    by fph il quozientatore ( 971015 ) on Friday March 13, 2020 @04:23PM (#59827486)
    If you test positive, you will get a lot of Adsense ads for face masks.

    • That is the better outcome. Are you sure that your insurer is not buying a Google data feed and is not participating in any of their Health initiatives?

      • Your results will be sold to 300+ partners at premium prices.

        If you're over 50:

        * Mortuaries and funeral homes
        *End of life attorneys (the will and trust pulp mills)
        *Your life insurance company (they know them)
        *All your creditors

        Because they already know them-- by your IP address and browser IDs.

    • Why adsense? Doesn't Google already have your CC in some cases? "We're sorry, due to certain regulations, we have automatically charged your card and expect masks in the mail soon. You have no choice in this matter."
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I would tend to guess that Amazon or Google or Microsoft could figure out with reasonably good accuracy who has coronavirus, or has come into contact with someone who is known to have it without a separate website...

    • So there was a story on Slashdot a few weeks back, about how the government was using phone location data to see where people had been around the border.

      This being a national emergency and all, why not get the data across the entire US, and go to test anyone who had been in near contact with someone we know to be infected? You could trace back through contact networks very quickly and find other as yet unknown cases, tracking contact with them and so forth - at the same time eliminating branching from thos

      • Google would be in the perfect situation to juggle all of this data also.
        If questionnaire = positive, then send user to testing center.
        If testing center = positive, then track down previous 14 days of Google Location history and require all of those users to be tested.
        If user GPS = leaves house during mandatory isolation/quarantine, then send armed officers in face masks...

        This is all trivial straight forward stuff, guys. Come on!

    • Don't forget facebook they could probably track STDs as well.

  • 1700 people working on a website = clusterfuck (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Friday March 13, 2020 @04:42PM (#59827572)

    It will require 5MB of javascript and 2MB of images, won't work properly on iPhones and won't even work in older browsers because people don't even know how to make basic HTML forms anymore.

    Hurray for progress.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by k6mfw ( 1182893 )
      I'd love to find that "HTML for Slackers" from the 1990s, if I knew URL, it is probably on archive.org. Prepare a document on MS Word, stuff </p><p> between paragraphs, use <b> and <i> where ever necessary (there's a few other of those < thingys). Copy/paste it on notepad, change txt to html, then ftp to the server and whammo, done.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dmbrun ( 907271 )
      You forgot the ads.

    • Most of the functionality will get embedded into the next version of Chrome and the website will be a simple function call to the browser to start the quiz. If you don't have Chrome then too bad.

  • WTF are 1700 engineers DOING on this project? It's like Trump Googled "How many engineers does Google have?" and then put the answer in an ad-hoc speech.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      I'm not sure that Rump knows how to use Google, it seems above his level of technical competence. He's probably just pulling numbers out of his nether regions again.

    • "Mr Trump, how many licks does it take to get to the middle of a Tootsie Pop?"

      "Let's find out...a one...a two...*crunch*...1,7000 and it cost the taxpayer 20 million. Half as much as it would have cost the Obama administration."

  • Quick, call Brooks! (Score:3)

    by dbrueck ( 1872018 ) on Friday March 13, 2020 @04:57PM (#59827660)

    Mythical Man-Month and all that.

  • I bet it will take them longer to deploy this website than it took the folks in China to build entire hospitals for dealing with the Coronavirus.

    • Those "hospitals" have already been emptied out and torn down. (true story)

      The building existed, to be sure, but they never had equipment installed in them necessary to be considered hospitals. They were just quarantine centers.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by cwesley ( 920116 )
        Ok... so replace the word -hospitals- with -quarantine centers- . My point still stands.
        • OK...so replace the words -quarantine centers- with -quonset hut-. I mean, the part of construction that takes longest is probably pouring the foundation and waiting for it to cure. If you're OK with dirt floors, don't mind the odd structural collapse or already have foundations you can pretty much just haul them off a truck and bolt the pieces together.

          Probably takes longer (and more people) to decide the color scheme of the nav bar for the website than it does to build an entire hospital structure, les
  • Do Google know about this or did he just make it up ?
    • He just made it up, of course. There's a kernal of truth to it, as Google's sister company was planning to make a site for san francisco-area healthcare workers to find testing sites...which was going to be neither national in scale, nor public.

      It's still not planned to be national in scale. If the web form for symptoms suggests that John Q. Public has the virus, the site isn't going to be able to direct them to a testing center unless they live in san francisco.

  • simply put a checklist up on the health department website.

  • I see a lot of posts about what will happen (or not), money being allocated, politicians making speeches, billionaires with no medical background proposing solutions... occasionally I see some article about a doctor recommending methods but its an article or some agency where it seems the physician can't really speak his or her mind (political consequences). Maybe someone of respectable knowledge has posted something but I can't find it among the noise.

  • Google and Facebook are at the bottom of the list of companies I trust.

  • This man has to be shown the info in the form of pictograms [techcrunch.com]. And I figure he's pulled this 1,700 engineers out of thin air. We're all doomed.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      That and he says everything is tremendous. It reminds me of a Seinfeld episode when Elaine is flattered a doctor calls her breathtaking. Then he calls an ugly baby breathtaking in a similar manner. At some point, one fails to grok anything Trump says as meaningful. It isn't, it is just a zephyr that passed between his brain and his mouth while he was typing or talking.

      • President Donald Trump, March 10, 2020:
        "I’ve been briefed on every contingency you can possibly imagine. Many contingencies. A lot of- a lot of positive. Different numbers. All different numbers. Very large numbers. And some small numbers too, by the way."

        Fucking hell. we're doomed.

        • its actually, NOW, a matter of national security that the president be removed from office.

          "the farm. immediately."

          he's putting our very lives in danger, every single delay and mistake he makes.

          we need to stop believing this idiot and impeach him at once. and yes, its not a one-time thing - he needs to be removed at once.

          people (some you know) will be dying in the next month, in the US. bet on it. all because he fumbled this, in every way possible.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gtall ( 79522 )

            For impeachment to happen, the invertebrates in the Senate would have to climb aboard. If they get blown out in the next election, then Trump will have been blown out as well.

            One pictures him sitting the oval office hyperventilating and refusing to leave claiming the election was "stolen from the American people".

            • One pictures him sitting the oval office hyperventilating and refusing to leave claiming the election was "stolen from the American people".

              I wouldn't be surprised that if he loses, he'll claim the elections were 'hacked' or 'rigged' and then declare martial law.

              For that matter, I wouldn't be surprised if he declared martial law and suspended the 2020 elections.

              Seriously, if he loses, does anyone imagine him accepting defeat, leaving gracefully, and assisting in an orderly transition of power? I don't.

    • Wait, you mean Trump misunderstood and/or lied? That never happened before! /sarcasm

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      Why was this modded down? The web site is being build by Verily, a tentacle of Alphabet: From that article and this is a statement from Google:

      "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 effo

  • I mean, most people are already being tracked, why not use that info for a little good. You take someone who's symptomatic or even tested positive. Poll their Android or google map or whatever, now you have a map of everywhere they've been. I think that would be letting the cat out of the bag since while most people sort of consider they are being tracked, they have no idea how constant and detailed the tracking is. Especially in the real world, not just their online browsing/shopping

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      Sure, should only take you, what, a few hours work to collate people's tracking data (assuming it is centralize and given that different companies have different networks). And what will you do with this tracking data? You don't know which ones are infected. You don't know which ones have been tested. And you don't know which are exhibiting false positives and false negatives. So the quality of any cross-fertilized data is suspect. You should meet the real world.

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