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BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s national government is cutting citizens’ record for COVID-19 surveillance, requiring a mandatory mobile app to demonstrate the past seven days, rather than 14, an adjustment that could encourage domestic tourism.
The app, whose call translates into an address map, helped the government identify whether other people were visiting COVID-infected spaces and whether they deserve to be tested for the virus or, in all likelihood, quarantined.
On Friday, one of the app’s developers said it would show cities visited by users in the past seven days, up from the previous two weeks.
The relief in the historical record has temporarily become one of the 20 most sensitive trends on the social media platform Weibo, with more than 180 million readings.
“It’s a smart thing for everyone, we don’t have to worry about our history for part of a month anymore,” one netizen said.
“14 days too complicated for those who have to make a lot of business trips,” said another.
This is the time when the app is first updated in days.
Last week, it stopped displaying asterisks next to the names of towns with small spaces that had been indexed as medium or high risk.
This adjustment came as the government said it would comply with COVID quarantine requirements.
The adjustments have led to an accumulation of online searches for flights and hotels.
The app is one of many teams China has as part of its “dynamic ZERO COVID” policy, a strategy that has helped keep the number of infections incredibly low, but has shaken the economy sharply with its radical brakes.
Many local governments also have their own cellular apps to view other people’s history, as well as their vaccination status and fitness. Many other people complained on social media that their employers had told them not to do so when new outbreaks appeared.
Domestic has been hit hard by China’s reaction to outbreaks of the highly infectious variant of Omicron in April and May, leading to drastic closures in several cities.
(Reporting through Roxanne Liu and Brenda Goh; Editing via Simon Cameron-Moore)