Verily launches coronavirus website for northern California adults
Verily Life Sciences, a healthcare technology organization owned by Alphabet Inc., has recently launched a coronavirus consulting website for adults in northern California. Through the website, which has been jointly developed with some of Google’s employees, the adult population in this region can consult about their recent travels and health conditions, which could result in free, effective COVID-19 testing.
The United States President, Donald Trump, has appreciated Google for developing such a platform, to help people determine whether and how to get the coronavirus test.
Verily is reportedly working in partnership with the governor’s office in California to identify high-risk individuals and direct them to the newly launched testing centers in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, by setting testing appointments and informing them through phone calls.
However, the company has asked people showing signs of flu-like symptoms to immediately seek medical care rather than attempting to go through its website testing for the life-threatening disease. COVID-19 has claimed the life of more than 6,700 people, with infected cases of nearly 174,000 recorded across the globe.
Verily will monitor and control an access to the restricted data collected from the people’s survey response, which would be stored in an encrypted Google database. The collected data is meant to be shared with the healthcare professionals; however, will not be shared with the data stored in Google products without the user’s explicit permission. The user-submitted data will also be used for research about the deadly virus, albeit only after getting the user’s permission.
However, the new consulting website has drawn some social media criticism as it mandates the formation of a Google account for users to get access to the website. Ryan Seys, Verily’s software engineer, has responded to the criticism by claiming that the initiative could make a real impact in identifying infected patients and curb the virus spread in the highly risky zone of northern California.
The company is yet to respond to request for comments on user activity.
Source credit:
About Author
Shreshtha Dhatrak
Despite having completed her Post Graduate degree in Digital Marketing, Shreshtha always nurtured an innate passion for writing. Currently, she works as a content writer for checkingforupdate.com and similar other portals, where she pens down news articles spanning the fields of energy, manufacturin...
Read More