Microsoft launches COVID-19 tracker, Alphabet's Verily puts up screening website

Major tech companies are joining the fight against the coronavirus outbreak. 

Microsoft’s Bing team has built a tracker for COVID-19, the official term for the disease caused by the virus, located at www.bing.com/covid. 

The site, launched Sunday, features a live map and tracks total confirmed cases of COVID-19 as well as cases per country. Click on a country and you’ll get more information about the virus outbreak there, with numbers of active/recovered/fatal cases, as well as news and videos. For the U.S., you’ll also get a breakdown of confirmed cases per state. 

The site doesn’t offer anything significantly different from similar trackers we’ve seen — Johns Hopkins university’s live map is still one of the best resources out there — but it’s fast, clean and mobile friendly. Also, the “News” tab for individual countries currently doesn’t show anything. 

The site was a team effort from Microsoft Bing employees working from home, and the data comes from sources such as the the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as well as the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

On Monday, Alphabet’s Verily launched a coronavirus screening website for the Santa Clara and San Mateo counties in California. Verily is a “sister company” to Google (both companies are subsidiaries of Alphabet) that’s focused on life sciences and healthcare. 

The launch follows remarks from President Donald Trump that Google is building a coronavirus test site, which seemed to have caught Google by surprise. 

The website is an “online screener based on guidelines from public health officials,” which will help people learn whether they qualify for testing through Verily’s program. And while the site is currently very limited in scope, Verily says it’s “working to rapidly expand testing.”

“The program is in its early stages, and we will take the time to assess operations at pilot sites in the Bay Area before rolling out to additional sites. We are working closely with Governor Newsom’s office, federal authorities and local public health authorities to ensure we have the right capabilities in place to help more people over the coming weeks,” Verily said in a blog post on its website.

To be eligible for the screener, users must be U.S. residents aged 18 or older, with a Google Account, and they must be willing to share health information with Google. 

The coronavirus has so far killed more than 6,500 and infected more than 169,661 people. The outbreak has been worsening in the U.S. in recent weeks, with more than 3,400 confirmed cases and 65 deaths.