People wearing protective face masks carry luggage at Capital Airport after the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in Beijing, China, November 5, 2020 REUTERS / Thomas Peter
BEIJING, Jul 8 (Reuters) – Chinese national authorities are restricting citizens’ travel history checks to monitor COVID-19 by requiring a mandatory mobile app to show the previous seven days of travel, up from 14, which could increase domestic tourism.
The app, whose name means a travel card, helped authorities determine if people were visiting areas infected with COVID and whether they should be tested for the virus or quarantined.
On Friday, one app developer said it would only display the cities users visited in the last seven days, compared to two weeks.
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The travel history record drop quickly became one of the top 20 themes on the Weibo social media platform, with over 180 million views. This may interest you : 22 new books will be published during the second half of 2022.
“It’s a good thing for everyone, we don’t have to worry about our travel history for half a month anymore,” said one user.
“14 days was too hard for those who have to make a lot of business trips,” said another.
It was the second major change to the app in recent days.
Last week, it completely stopped placing asterisks next to city names with small zones that were listed as medium or high risk.
This adjustment came as the government said it would reduce COVID quarantine requirements.
The changes have led to a sharp increase in searches for flights and hotels on the Internet. read more
The app is one of the many tools used by China under its “dynamic zero COVID” policy, a strategy that has helped keep infections very low but has severely damaged the economy with its wide curbs.
Many local governments also have their own mobile apps that display people’s travel stories, vaccination status, and health status. Many people have complained on social media that their employers have banned them from traveling when new epidemics broke out.
Domestic travel has been hit hard in China’s response to outbreaks of the highly infectious Omicron variant in April and May, causing drastic blockages in several cities.
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Reporting by Roxanne Liu and Brenda Goh; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore
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