China shuts down travel tracking app implemented as containment measure against Covid-19

A new symbol of the exit from its politics “zero covid”: China announced today that key travel tracking app shuts down for Covid, which was used to certify whether residents have passed through a zone where a coronavirus outbreak has been recorded.

This announcement comes as the number of cases seems to be exploding in the country, on a scale that is still difficult to assess as PCRs are no longer mandatory and citizens rarely inform the authorities of their positive tests.

The app, known as a “commuter map”, was based on teleportation and allowed users to show their interlocutors the cities they had been to in the previous seven days.

If none of these areas had been designated as “high risk” (ie with a high number of cases), the application had a green indicator, synonymous with free movement.

The “transportation card”, under the responsibility of the central government, will be deactivated from midnight today (local time), after more than two and a half years of use, according to an official announcement.

The same time, citizens lined up outside special clinics for those with a fever in Chinese hospitals waiting to be tested for COVID-19 today, in a new sign of the rapid spread of symptoms after authorities began to relax measures against the disease.

Three years after the pandemic began, China is scrambling to align with the rest of the world that has largely reopened to cope with COVID, making a major policy shift last Wednesday after unprecedented protests against restrictions .

Authorities continue to recommend mask use and vaccination, particularly for the elderly.

But with limited exposure to the disease until now, China is ill-prepared, analysts say, for a wave of infections that could increase pressure on a fragile health system and bring businesses to their knees.

Lily Li, who works for a toy company in Gungazhou in the southern part of the country, said several workers, as well as employees of suppliers and distribution companies, have been infected and are in home isolation. “Basically everyone is now running to buy rapid tests at the same time but they have somehow given up hope that COVID can be contained,” she said. “We have accepted the fact that at some point we will get COVID.”

In the capital Beijing, about 80 people huddled in the cold outside a clinic in the Chaoyang district as ambulances drove by.

A local government official in Beijing said today that visits to such clinics have reached 22,000 a day, a 16-fold increase from the previous week.

Reuters saw similar queues outside clinics in the central city of Wuhan, where COVID-19 first appeared three years ago.

The numbers of patients waiting to be admitted to clinics are increasing, a doctor working at a Beijing hospital told the Global Times newspaper yesterday.

In recent weeks, cases of local transmission are, however, at lower levels from a high of 40,052 at the end of November, according to official data. Sunday’s tally was 8,626 cases compared with 10,597 new cases a day earlier.

But the figures reflect a loosening of mandatory testing measures, analysts say, while health officials have warned of an imminent outbreak.

In comments to Shanghai Securities News today, Zhang Wenhong, head of the Shanghai Expert Group, said the current outbreak may peak in a month, although the end of the pandemic may be three to six months away. In a post on WeChat, Zhang’s team said that despite the outbreak, Omicron’s current strain did not cause long-term damage and people should be optimistic. “We’re about to get out of the tunnel. Air, sun, free movement, all this awaits us”, according to the post.

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