Beijing: China On Monday, it said it would retire the app it used to track travel in contiguous areas Cases of Kovid-19A milestone in the rapid turnaround of the country Zero-tolerance coronavirus strategy. Beijing has effectively thrown in the towel on zero-covid, announcing an end to a massive lockdown last week. Mandatory quarantine In central facilities, and wide relaxation of testing measures.
The central government is now beginning to shake off years of state-led “hard policymaking”.Communications Itinerary Card“, which tracks whether someone has been to a high-risk area based on their phone signal, went offline at 12 a.m. on Tuesday. The “itinerary card” was a central part of China’s zero-covid policy, requiring millions of people between provinces. Key in their phone numbers to create his signature green arrows to travel or enter events and some public places.
First introduced in 2020 with a four-tier system that assigned different colors based on users’ predicted level Coming in contact with Kovid, it was tweaked several times before the final change this year reduced the tracking period from 14 to seven days. It is one of the only tracking apps that has governed daily life in China throughout the pandemic, with most people still using local “health codes” run by their city or province to enter shops and offices.
The changes have been introduced despite warnings from a top health expert of a rise in omicron cases that leave millions of elderly people in the country still unvaccinated. But social media users nevertheless appreciated the retirement of the itinerary card, noting the symbolism of the central government shutting down its flagship tracking app.
Many posted screenshots of their “last” logins. “Bye bye, this heralds the end of an era, and also welcomes a brand new one,” one person wrote on the Twitter-like Weibo platform. “Goodbye itinerary card, concert here I come,” wrote another.
Others asked what would happen to the mountains of data collected by the app. “Itinerary cards and other similar products mean a huge amount of personal information and private data,” wrote one Weibo user. “I hope there are methods and steps to log out and delete this.”
Kendra Schaefer, tech partner at research consultancy Trivium China, said “the political victory of returning to normalcy is huge”. “All the government really loses by deleting those apps is a fast-track method of keeping certain people at home based on public safety rationales,” she wrote on Twitter. “As the Covid restrictions disappear, the logic disappears, and the benefits of removal outweigh the benefits of keeping them,” she added.
But that return to normalcy means the country is now faced with a surge in cases it is ill-equipped to handle, millions of elderly people still not fully vaccinated and underfunded hospitals lacking the capacity to accommodate large numbers of patients. The country has one intensive care unit bed for 10,000 people, Jiao Yahui, director of the National Health Commission’s medical affairs department, warned last week.
Officially reported cases in the country have fallen sharply from an all-time high last month, but top Chinese health expert Zhong Nanshan warned in state media on Sunday that the current Omicron variant is “rapidly spreading” across the country.
The easing of Covid restrictions has also revealed pent-up demand for domestic travel, with state broadcaster CCTV saying on Monday that flights from Beijing’s two main airports are expected to soon return to 70 percent of 2019 levels. China reported 8,626 local Covid cases on Monday, but the number is believed to be much higher as testing is no longer mandatory for most of the population.
