Alphabet’s Verily Struggles to Live Up to Trump’s Hype on Covid Testing

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In mid-March, Pete Massaro felt like he was in over his head. The global coronavirus pandemic was spreading quickly through the U.S., and Massaro, an engineer at Verily, the life sciences unit owned by Alphabet Inc., had suddenly been tasked with heading up the company’s efforts to help speed testing people for Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. He now had three days to open two drive-through testing sites.

It was a tall order. Massaro’s team would have to find suitable locations, staff them, source supplies and figure out how to safely do the tests. Then, adding to the stress, President Donald Trump announced out of the blue that Google, Verily’s sister unit under the Alphabet umbrella, was working on a nationwide system to coordinate testing. While Trump mistook Verily for Google, he also overpromised on the effort behind the fledgling operation, which was to start with only two counties in California. The announcement on March 13 threw Massaro’s team abruptly into the spotlight. After a sleepless weekend, Verily’s project went live on Monday March 16.

“This didn’t feel as serious until it became very serious,” said Massaro, who is director of automation at Verily. “It sort of shook us into action.”

In the nearly two months since Trump’s announcement, the pressure hasn't let up. Verily, along with local health officials, private clinics and large corporations, have scrambled to quickly open thousands of pop-up testing sites across the country in an effort to fill gaps in the American health-care system.

But it’s not clear that this patchwork model of testing sites will ever reach the level of testing necessary, or the right people, to ease up on national social distancing requirements and help businesses safely reopen. As of May 4, Verily had facilitated testing for about 42,000 people. That’s a fraction of the nearly 7 million tests done across the U.S. since early January, according to The COVID Tracking Project. But that isn’t nearly up to the 500,000 tests a day experts say the U.S. will need -- at a minimum. Right now, the country is doing about half of that on the most active days. Testing is still limited to people who are ill or part of high-risk populations such as health care workers and nursing home residents. But it will need to expand to include everyone who comes into contact with a person who is positive.

Even for a company like Verily, backed by Alphabet with its immense financial and human resources, getting a testing program up and running is extremely complicated. Verily is, at its core, a technology and research company, not a medical facility. Its initial proposal for Covid-19 testing was to create a website to help screen people with symptoms and send them to one of two Verily sites where they could be tested. On its first day in operation, Verily’s website was overwhelmed with applicants. The company tested just 20 people.