During his Rose Garden press conference Friday afternoon, President Donald Trump declared that Google was building a nationwide coronavirus screening website:

“Google is going to develop a website — it’s going to be very quickly done, unlike websites of the past — to determine if a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location. We have many, many locations behind us, by the way. We cover this country and large parts of the world, by the way. We’re not gonna be talking about the world right now, but we cover very, very strongly our country. Stores in virtually every location. Google has 1,700 engineers working on this right now. They have made tremendous progress.”

But as is so often the case with things Trump says, that’s simply not true.

According to The Verge:

“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 tech giant later confirmed that what the president had said was complete BS:

Carolyn Wang, communications lead for Verily, also noted that the “triage website” is:

“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.'”

Is it any wonder why almost no one believes a word Donald Trump says?

Featured Image Via NBC News