CNN
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China on Tuesday will phase out its “mobile itinerary card,” a Covid-19 tracking service, officials said.
“Mobile itinerary card inquiry channels such as text messages, web pages, WeChat extensions, Alipay extensions and apps will be offline at the same time,” the country’s Academy of Information and Communication Technology said in a statement.
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, China has used an itinerary card system to track individuals’ travel history over a 14-day period. It is intended to identify individuals who have visited cities in areas designated as “high degree zones”.
If a person has been to a city with a “high risk zone” in the last 14 days, that city is starred in the system.
The system has identified people’s movements in public spaces across China, along with health QR codes that track individual health status regarding Covid-19.
Many Chinese believe that local governments have allowed them to formulate a general policy of banning entry to anyone who has visited a city with a “high-risk zone” without even having been to the city. It has been criticized on social media. A high-risk zone within the city.
The announcement that the system will end follows China’s announcement last week of 10 new guidelines that eased some Covid-19 restrictions.
The 10-point plan would largely eliminate health code tracking in most public places, roll back mass testing, allow many positive cases to be quarantined at home, and ‘high risk’. imposed restrictions on the lockdown of areas deemed to be
A top health official in Beijing said the rule change was based on scientific evidence, including the relatively modest spread of the Omicron variant, vaccination rates and China’s level of experience in responding to the virus.
This follows a series of protests in late November and early December calling for an end to lockdowns and zero Covid measures in China.
Even after much of the world eased pandemic restrictions, China continued to lock down entire cities, send all Covid-19 patients to central quarantine facilities, and limit visits to areas where positive cases were detected.
Thousands of people took to the streets during the protests to express widespread dissatisfaction with censorship and the authoritarian leadership of the ruling Communist Party.
