The Application to track Covid-19 patients.

 

Corona Virus: China stops working with the application to track people infected with Covid-19.

China announced the suspension of a mobile application that tracked people's movements during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

The nationwide app, which has been in operation for three years, will be out of service by the end of Monday. This is the latest change in policy that indicates that Beijing is beginning to abandon its controversial strategy known as zero-Covid. The move is largely symbolic, but it won't have much impact on people's daily lives due to local apps still being used in Chinese cities.
The state-run Telecom Itinerary Card app, which uses mobile phone signal to track a person's movements and see if they have traveled to an area deemed high risk, was seen as a central part of China's zero-Covid policy.

People were asked to enter their phone numbers into the app to get a green arrow indicating they could travel between provinces and enter events. Now that inter-provincial travel has been eased through the removal of COVID-19 restrictions, the national application has been declared void by officials. Many social media users in China welcomed the app's retirement. But the app is just one of many tracking apps that have dominated people's daily lives in China, where many still use scanning systems run by their city or county to gain entry to local facilities and public buildings.
The change in this policy is symbolic for a country moving away from its controversial zero-Covid strategy in the wake of large-scale protests in several cities. The latest protests were sparked by a fire in an apartment tower in western China's Xinjiang region that killed 10 people last November, with long-standing restrictions blamed for hampering rescue efforts.
Following policy changes, people with COVID-19 can now self-isolate at home rather than in government facilities, and there is a broad easing of mass testing for COVID. China is now seeing an increase in Covid cases, with authorities in Beijing saying more than 22,000 patients visited hospitals across the city on Sunday - 16 times more than the number recorded a week ago. China recorded 8,626 new local cases of infection on Sunday, but given that examinations and tests are no longer carried out on a large scale, it is believed that the numbers are much higher than announced. Despite its easing of measures, China is still considered one of the countries with some of the most stringent Covid-related restrictions in the world.