New symbol of coming out of zero Covid: China announced on Monday the shutdown of the main anti-Covid travel tracking application, used to check whether residents have passed through an affected area.

This announcement comes as the number of cases seems to be exploding in the country, on a scale that is still difficult to assess because PCR tests are no longer compulsory and individuals only rarely inform the authorities of their positive self-tests.

Called “Travel map”, the application was based on telephone boundary marking and allowed its users to show their interlocutors (hotel, building, shopping center) the cities they had visited during the last seven days.

If none of these places was classified as “high risk” (that is to say with a large number of cases), the application displayed a green arrow, synonymous with authorized passage.

The “Travel Card”, under the responsibility of the central government, will be deactivated from midnight Tuesday morning, after more than two and a half years of service, according to an official press release.

End of large-scale lockdowns

The move comes after China's announcement on Wednesday of a sudden and drastic easing of health measures - a very clear move away from its "zero Covid" policy intended to avoid any deaths.

The government had notably announced the end of large-scale confinements and the end of the systematic placements of people who tested positive in quarantine centers – decried establishments, with very variable comfort.

The Health Ministry on Monday reported 8,626 new local cases of people who tested positive in China.

This figure has fallen sharply in recent days but does not reflect the reality of the current epidemic wave, which is going under the statistical radar.

One of China's most respected figures in the fight against Covid, respiratory disease specialist Zhong Nanshan, said on Sunday that the Omicron variant was "spreading rapidly" in the country.



Launched in early 2020, the application was powered by telephone boundary data from the three Chinese mobile operators.

The vagueness remains on the conservation of data and on the continuation or not of their collection.

Because the application itself did not collect anything, it was only the interface which made it possible to display the results of the collection of information.

“The application may disappear, but the data is still there”, underlines analyst Kendra Schaefer, specialist in the subject at the Beijing firm Trivium China.

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