Trump says Google is making 'tremendous progress' on a coronavirus website

When faced with illness, the president of the United States just turned to Google for help.

In a rambling Friday afternoon press conference, Donald Trump told the American people that their favorite search engine is here to save the day. Specifically, he insisted that Google is developing a website that will both help concerned individuals determine if they need a coronavirus test and where they can get one.

In other words, Trump's big pandemic plan essentially boils down to a fancier version of "Google your symptoms."

"I want to thank Google," Trump told the reporters gathered at the White House. "Google is helping to develop a website, it's gonna 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."

The president continued on, insisting that "Google has 1,700 engineers working on this right now," and that the company has "made tremendous progress."

We reached out to Google in an attempt to determine just what, exactly, Trump is talking about but received no immediate response. After the initial publication of this story, Verily, the life and sciences division of Alphabet, Google's parent company, issued a statement letting the world know that we shouldn't expect anything too soon.

"We are developing a tool to help triage individuals for Covid-19 testing," read the statement. "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."

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Importantly, it is incredibly difficult to get a test in the U.S. at the moment. Just yesterday, the New York Times reported on sick people across the country people unable to access coronavirus tests.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, confirmed that dire reality.

"The idea of anybody getting [the test] easily the way people in other countries are doing it, we are not set up for that," he told the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Thursday. "Do I think we should be? Yes. But we are not."

Notably, online diagnosis tools like the one Trump seems to be describing have a long and rather unflattering history. A 2015 study exploring this very issue concluded that "Symptom checkers had deficits in both triage and diagnosis."

Trump doesn't seem like the type to read studies, however. But don’t worry, people. The President seems to have this all under control.

Update: Friday, March 13, 5:22 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to include Verily's statement.