Beijing Two to three weeks of quarantine in a hotel room with no exit – anyone who currently wants to travel to China has to endure that. Depending on the city and flight, the room in which you have to spend 14 to 21 days and nights is 10 to 30 square meters. In some cases it has a balcony, in most cases just a window that cannot be opened. Those who have served the time, so the deal, can participate normally in life in the almost Covid-free China.
But what if it doesn’t work out because the technology is crazy? Shortly after the outbreak of the pandemic, China was already using so-called digital health codes to curb the spread of the coronavirus. The number of associated apps in the People’s Republic is now absurdly high. Almost every city and province in the country with 1.4 billion inhabitants has its own, and there is also one from the Chinese State Council.
The mini-programs that users can install within the widely used WeChat messenger app, for example, are now part of everyday life. They show where someone has been in the past few weeks. If you have stayed in a high-risk area – in China these are usually cities where a few hundred of several million people have been infected with the virus – the code on the cell phone gives a warning signal and lights up yellow, for example. Then, for example, you can only return to Beijing if you have waited 14 days and the code is green again.
Apart from the fundamental, deep interference with the civil liberties of the residents of China, the code is prone to errors. Especially at the beginning of the crisis there were repeated problems with the software. Desperate citizens sought help on the Internet because their code had switched from green to yellow or even red for no apparent reason. Although they had never left their city or been to high-risk areas, suddenly they were not even allowed to go to the park or to their office because they had to show a green code there.
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Even today, in the second year of the corona pandemic, the system is prone to errors. I only recently had to experience that firsthand. After three weeks of successfully completing quarantine in a hotel in Qingdao following a stay in Germany, my health code from Beijing should have turned to green on the day I was released. It worked for some of my quarantine neighbors too – not for others.
Reasons for incorrect codes are obscure
The attending hotel staff therefore urgently advised us not to take the train back to our homes at the end of the quarantine – because in contrast to the airport, the submission of the code is required at the train station, it said. Three weeks of quarantine, around a dozen nose and throat swabs and two blood tests, all of which were negative – and yet you are still not free because the digital code shows the wrong status.
The authorities have now adjusted to the problems. Throughout China you can dial the number “12345” and at the other end of the line, very nice employees try to find the fault. In some cases, however, that doesn’t help either.
It worked for me one day after the official end of my quarantine. The system was allegedly mixed up because I have two phone numbers in China, it said. I will probably never find out whether it really was that in the end.
For others, the code was still not green days after the actual end of the quarantine – it is not known why. In any case, “12345” couldn’t help. In everyday life you have to hope that you will not be asked for the code – and if in doubt, present a printed piece of paper that confirms the completed quarantine period.
One thing remains as a lesson: China is good at just trying things out. As long as you don’t have to rely on a product, that’s also exciting and interesting. Where there are still quarrels in many places around the world, in the People’s Republic, for example, you can already be driven by self-driving cars in almost every rich mega-city. But the joy of experimentation does not stop at programs that have the potential to intervene as massively in people’s lives as the health code apps. And then at the latest, the willingness to experiment becomes a problem.
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