US President Donald Trump says Google CEO Sundar Pichai called to apologize

US President Donald Trump today on Monday (March 16) said at a daily coronavirus press briefing at the White House that Google CEO Sundar Pichai called him to apologize.

President Trump, however, did not clarify what Pichai apologized for but he praised the communications team of tech giant for substantiating his comments about Google’s coronavirus screening site.

“I want to thank the people at Google and Google Communications because as you know, they substantiated what I said on Friday,” said Trump. “The head of Google, who is a great gentleman — said — called us — and apologized. I don’t know where the press got their fake news, but they got it someplace. As you know, this is from Google [holds up printout of Google Communication’s statement on Twitter]. They put out a release [drops the paper on the ground] and you guys can figure it out yourselves and how that got out and I’m sure you’ll apologize. But it would be great if we could really give the news correctly. It would be so, so wonderful,” President Trump said.

Earlier on Monday, Google and Alphabet CEO Pichai had posted an update to Google’s blog that outlines the efforts undertaken by the company to tackle coronavirus threat. Pichai has clarfieid in his blog some of the confusion and highlighted the steps taken by the company to get more information about the virus and COVID-19 to its users. Pichai has also talked in detail about the work Alphabet is doing to build a screening site for the Bay Area.

It may be recalled that Trump had said on Friday that 1,700 Google engineers were working on this screening site. “I want to thank Google. 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. 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,” he had said.