California Covid-19 risk screening and testing

> A Google account is needed to access the Baseline Platform. The information you provide will be stored in a secure, encrypted database. Verily personnel who need to contact you, such as staff to schedule your testing, will have access to direct identification information (your name, street address, phone number, and email).

> The information you provide may also be shared with the health care professionals who collect your specimen, the clinical laboratory that processes your specimen, the California Department of Public Health, and potentially other federal, state, and local health authorities, and other entities that assist with the testing program. Information may also be shared with certain service providers engaged to perform services on behalf of Verily, including Google, which Verily leverages for certain technology and services, including cloud services, security services, data storage, website hosting, and other support functions.

Interestingly they don't mention anything past California as an ambition, was this the idea Trump was talking about?

There are two projects related to Google going on - one is this one, from Verily, another is broader information website, led by Google. From TC[1]:

Google later clarified is that there are at least two different efforts here. Google’s work around bringing more information about COVID-19 to its users across its various services — and Verily’s efforts to launch a pilot website “that will enable individuals to do a risk assessment and be scheduled for testing at sites in the Bay Area.”

I can not say which one Trump meant - and am not sure if he really goes into the details beyond "we're working with Google folks on making information available" - the President usually doesn't do such things by himself, he delegates - but I would assume he probably meant the other one. But maybe both. Or maybe just Verily effort and extending it to broader reach. We'll see.

[1] https://techcrunch-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/techcrunch.com...

How does something like this really help? It seems like an automated phone answering system for COVID testing. This seems like, maybe, 0.1% of the problem we have in this country with dealing with this virus. I'm not saying it's unhelpful, just that it doesn't seem all that helpful either. It seems like a bunch of hot air from Trump and Google.

Also, isn't verily a bioscience company? I would expect them to be working on testing, or treatments, or almost anything other than a website. This drastically lowers my opinion of what I thought verily was, which admittedly, I didn't know much, I just figured it would being doing something a little more "hands on" here. Hopefully they're doing that too...

Also:

> Your data collected by Verily through the testing program will never be joined with your data stored in Google products without your explicit permission.

Who outside of even a subset of software engineers know what this means?

In Canada, the communication I've been seeing is basically that they are only interested in testing you if you might need treatment. Since people under 18 are at such low medical risk from this virus, they're probably very low priority to test. Combine that with the fact that laws probably exist that make it inconvenient to provide this service for them, and it likely makes sense to just blanket exclude them from the program.