China on Tuesday pulled the plug on its “mobile itinerary card”, a smartphone tracking app that had been introduced during the early days of the outbreak in 2020 and had become a symbol of the zero-Covid campaign.
The move was the latest step in easing of China’s pandemic restrictions. Since the central government on Dec 7 announced a 10-point plan to scale back its stringent zero-Covid policy, mass PCR testing in hot spots has ended. Residential lockdowns and quarantines have been reduced dramatically, though people coming into mainland China from abroad still need to self-isolate.
“I had a positive PCR test on Tuesday, but I can still go out,” a 30-something man in Dalian said.
Apps developed by individual cities are starting to fall out of use as well. Shanghai on Tuesday scrapped a requirement to show a negative test result on its app to enter malls or public facilities.
Meanwhile, cases seem to be skyrocketing. Beijing public health authorities reported 22,000 visits to fever clinics on Sunday, a 16-fold surge from a week earlier, and people have been lining up at hospitals.
“There is already an underlying trend that could lead to surging infections in Beijing,” a city representative said in a news conference.
But the central government reported only about 7,500 new coronavirus infections in mainland China for Monday – far fewer than the Nov 27 peak of more than 40,000. Ting Lu, chief China economist at Nomura, said in a report Tuesday that this data is misleading, noting a steep drop-off in PCR testing.
The omicron subvariants currently circulating in China are highly infectious, and “it is difficult to completely cut off transmission even with stronger prevention and control measures”, Zhong Nanshan, a highly influential Covid-19 expert, told the official Xinhua News Agency on Friday.
Media outlet Yicai on Sunday quoted Zhong Ming, a senior physician at Zhongshan Hospital in Shanghai, as predicting that cases would peak within a month.
The policy shift is starting to take a toll on businesses. An executive at a big Japanese company operating in Beijing said that between employees who may have contracted Covid-19 and those looking to avoid risking infection, “only around 20% of people are coming into the office”.
Another foreign company had initially required employees to return to in-person work once coronavirus restrictions were relaxed Dec 7. But with community spread apparently accelerating, “we switched back to remote work for people who don’t need to be in the office”, a human resources representative said.
Food and grocery delivery services in Beijing have gotten bogged down, likely because of a shortage of capacity as more drivers contract the virus.
“We’ve had more and more infections among our employees,” said a representative at a Japanese company running an electronic parts factory in Guangzhou. “We’ve managed to avoid a shutdown, but we don’t know how things will go in the future.”
In the auto industry hub of Chongqing, some manufacturers are distributing home test kits to employees and allowing only those who test negative to come in. A growing number of workers are being forced to stay home after failing to produce negative tests, leaving production capacity idle.
Zhong Nanshan stressed the importance of Covid-19 vaccine booster shots, while Chinese authorities have been encouraging older adults in particular to get vaccinated.
Vaccination rates in this age group are lower here than in Japan or the US, with 86% of people aged 60 and older and 66% of those 80 and older having received two doses as of late November, according to official data.