latest developments Coronavirus: Business and technology in a pandemic From cancelled conferences to disrupted supply chains, not a corner of the global economy is immune to the spread of COVID-19. Read More

The Microsoft Bing team launched today a web portal for tracking coronavirus (COVID-19) infections across the globe.

"Lots of Bing folks worked (from home) this past week to create a mapping and authoritative news resource for COVID19 info," said Michael Schechter, General Manager for Bing Growth and Distribution at Microsoft.

The website, accessible at bing.com/covid, is a basic tracker. It shows up-to-date infection statistics for each country around the globe and all the US states.

Data is aggregated from authoritative sources like the World Health Organization (WHO), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

Users can click countries or US states on the map and see the latest infection stats, along with the latest COVID-19 news coverage for that specific country or state.

Microsoft announced the website tonight, two days after President Trump said Google began working on COVID-19-related portal for US citizens.

According to reports, Google's websites will be more than just an infection tracker and news portal, and will also include information on COVID-19 symptoms, risks associated with the disease, and info on local testing centers.

Google's website is being built by Verily, a subsidiary of Alphabet focused on healthcare services. More than 1,700 engineers are currently working on the site, President Trump said.

The COVID-19 outbreak, which started in late December 2019 in China, has now infected more than 168,000 people and killed nearly 6,500.

Earlier this week, the WHO officially declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. The last time when a global pandemic was declared was in 2009, for the H1N1 influenza virus.