Google has pledged $50 million to help fight the coronavirus pandemic. On a newly-launched website about all things COVID-19, the company said that a part of that $50 million pledge is $5M in matching donations to the UN Foundation’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for the World Health Organization (WHO).
The site, which Google is positioning as its dedicated COVID-19 hub, can be accessed at google.com/covid19. It comes with important information about the virus from accredited sources, like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The site provides guidelines on how to prevent the disease by following good hygiene habits like washing your hands. It also lists the symptoms and warns people that there’s no specific treatment for it at the moment. The site also advises people to follow ‘social distancing’ and self-quarantine themselves if they feel they may have contracted the virus.
There are also various videos on the same topics from the aforementioned sources, as well as data and insights from Google Trends, including a full-fledged COVID-19 map that shows the affected locations and the exact number of cases being reported from around the world. You can access Google’s dedicated COVID-19 hub from the link above.
You can also donate to the global coronavirus response by clicking on the blue ‘Donate’ button on the page. 100 percent of your donation will go to the UN Foundation for the World Health Organization. Google says that it will match $2 for every $1 donated to the cause by its users.
It’s worth noting that Google launched its dedicated COVID-19 hub after much back and forth between the company and US President, Donald Trump, about whether the search giant was building a website with information about the novel coronavirus. While Trump last week announced that Google was building such a site, the company itself didn’t originally plan to do so, but seemingly changed its mind at a later stage.
