Oh, Jesus

Here we go again.

Google is not working with the US government in building a nationwide website to help people determine whether and how to get a novel coronavirus test, despite what President Donald Trump said in the course of issuing an emergency declaration for the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, a much smaller trial website made by another division of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is going up. It will only be able to direct people to testing facilities in the Bay Area.

  The Verge

And that damned woman stood up there with a fucking chart touting it.

What is WRONG with these people?

Carolyn Wang, communications lead for Verily, told The Verge that the “triage website” was initially only going to be made available to health care workers instead of the general public. Now that it has been announced the way it was, however, anybody will be able to visit it, she said. But the tool will only be able to direct people to “pilot sites” for testing in the Bay Area, though Wang says Verily hopes to expand it beyond California “over time.”

The triage site should be put live within a few days, and it will be hosted at Project Baseline, the Verily website where people can sign up to take part in clinical trials. That’s a seemingly odd place for the triage tool to live, but Wang says that Project Baseline already has certain necessary tools like an informed consent agreement, so it makes sense to put it there.

[...]

In all, the difference between the reality of what is being built and what was promised during the press conference is very large.

Debbie Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, showed a flowchart during the press conference that explained what the proposed functionality of the website would be. Nobody from Alphabet or Google spoke at the event, although may executives from other health and retail companies did.

As Birx described the website, citizens would be able to enter their symptoms and, depending on what the results are, be directed to a “drive thru” testing facility. That same website would apparently also be where people can go to find their results.

So are the drive-through testing sites they touted actually happening?

Jesus wept.

UPDATE 3/31: This explains a lot: Jared Kushner was in charge of this, and his brother is co-founder of the company that was to build the website.

These slimebuckets never quit.