On June 29, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China announced that China will not longer mark the cities with COVID infections in the travel tracking system in order to balance epidemic control and socioeconomic development, starting from Wednesday.
Currently, if you pass through an area with an epidemic, your travel card is marked with an asterisk. With that mark, your travel will be restricted, and many areas will refuse you to enter.
For cargo drivers who have been traveling around for a long time, the travel card with asterisks means that they cannot get off the high speed way when they reach their destination, and they have to face a long isolation time and repeated nucleic acid testing, which is very troublesome. There are not a few drivers who are quarantined because the travel card has an « asterisk », which also greatly reduces the driver’s desire to do transport work.
Now the « asterisk » mark is removed, which means that it will be more convenient for drivers to pass through other provinces, cities and service areas. Will the logistics industry get better quickly because of this policy?
The industry believes that the efficiency of transportation will certainly improve, but other reasons for the market downturn remain unresolved like high oil prices and low freight rates.
However, although the asterisks are canceled, it is still unknown whether the epidemic prevention policies of various regions will change.
The reporter learned that as of 18:00 on June 29, most provinces and cities have not immediately issued a policy on medium- and high-risk areas after « asterisks removal ». The reporter called 12345 in Xi’an, Hangzhou, Wuhan and other places to learn that if residents of Beijing, Nanjing and other areas with epidemics come to the above cities, the negative nucleic acid test certificate and the green health code within the validity period still need to be checked, and they need to report to community in time. In addition, according to the “Coronavirus Pneumonia Prevention and Control Plan (Ninth Edition)” issued on June 28, residents in medium and high-risk areas still cannot be « willful » when traveling. Therefore, it will take some time to verify the actual situation.
In general, the cancellation of the asterisk policy is still good news, proving that the accuracy of epidemic prevention and control will be further improved in the future, and some unnecessary and excessive epidemic prevention measures will be gradually banned. This will make people’s travel more convenient, thereby driving the recovery of the economy.