Covid-19: Rome reopens churches after Pope steps in

Working on self-check site for virus, says Google

San Francisco: US President Donald Trump announced Friday that internet giant Alphabet is creating a website where people will be able to check whether they have symptoms of the novel coronavirus.

Verily Life Sciences, once a project in a Google X lab devoted to “moonshot” projects and now its own health business unit, is testing a “tool to help triage individuals for COVID-19 testing,” Google confirmed on Twitter.

“Verily is in the early stages of development, and planning to roll testing out in the Bay Area, with the hope of expanding more broadly over time,” the tweet said, referring to San Francisco and surrounding communities.

Trump thanked Google while declaring a state of national emergency due to the deadly coronavirus pandemic.

Google is helping to develop a website “to determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location,” Trump said.

Google has a large team of engineers devoted to the project, and has made significant progress, according to Trump.

“Our overriding goal is to stop the spread of the virus and help all Americans impacted by this,” Trump said.

“Again, we don’t want everybody taking this test. It is totally unnecessary. And this will pass.”

Vatican City: Some of Rome’s Catholic churches reopened Friday after Pope Francis voiced displeasure with the Italian authorities’ push to shut them because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The rare standoff between the 83-year-old pontiff and Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s government came as Italy’s death toll reached 1,266.

The Mediterranean country has suffered more than half the COVID-19 fatalities reported outside China and has seen the toll grow by hundreds each day.

Conte has responded by shuttering most shops and all restaurants and other public places in the hope of stemming contagion and easing the burden on overstretched hospitals.

Italians have been told to avoid going outside without a good reason and machine-gun toting soldiers now patrol city streets. But churches have stayed open in the overwhelmingly Catholic country throughout what many now call Italy’s biggest crisis since World War II.

That changed when the vicar of Rome said Thursday he could no longer withstand government pressure and was closing all Catholic places of worship across the Italian capital.

The Rome diocese lists slightly over 1,000 churches — about 900 of them

Catholic ones.

The pope’s response was unusually swift and blunt.

“Drastic measures are not always good,” the Argentine-born pope said in livestreamed Friday morning prayer.

He prayed for “pastors to have the good judgement... Not to leave the holy, faithful people of God alone.”

The vicar of Rome then issued a statement explaining that he had had “a further meeting” with the pontiff in which it was decided to let at least some churches to reopen their doors.