A Letter to All Members of European Chamber Nanjing Chapter--Actual COVID-19 Outbreak in Nanjing Go back »

2021-07-29 | Nanjing

Dear members of Nanjing Chapter, 

I sincerely hope that every one of you is healthy and staying safe. Amid the challenging time of the COVID outbreak in Nanjing, we appreciate your trust and offer you to working closely with the European Chamber Nanjing chapter team on common challenges. Our Nanjing Chapter team is closely monitoring the situational development, to ensure you have the actual information required to stay up-to-date and to enable you to make your decisions based on latest facts. 

Since the first new COVID-19 infection cases have been reported on July 20^th, we are facing a daily increase of the reported infection numbers. Intensive efforts are put forth to response to the crisis and to manage the emergencies, which are increasingly affecting our daily life and business operations in the meanwhile. 

We are aware about the various related challenges that our member companies and your employees, especially foreign nationals, are facing. Our Nanjing Chapter team is in touch with the relevant government departments and works on solutions to the issues of concern with the joint efforts of member companies and government authorities. In the following, we would like to give you some examples. 

Difficulties faced by member companies

● We advocate for an improvement of the public emergency management

For example, our member companies face pressure, liability pushes and burden from the authorities on the execution of the mass testing and preventive quarantines. A reliable method to ensure test participation is crucial. The commercial burden of precautious measures (e.g. quarantines) remains mainly with the companies. 

Case 1-1.  Commitment of employers to the test status of all employees:
The general manager or the legal representative of a member company has been requested to sign a confirming statement that all the employees have conducted the relevant mass test round of the governmental testing campaigns. However, registration or test accomplishment provided in the online APP for test application and tracking, are not providing any record of the employee’s test participation. Additionally, corporations are required to send their employees to designated test sites as a group, but in parallel the communities call local residents to their test sites, which prevails according to information from the authorities. Under this situation, the employer faces difficulties in determining the test status of all employees and can in fact not take the liability for required statements, given multi-channel approaches without suitable records provided.

Case 1-2.  The accuracy and organization of mass testing.
The citywide mass testing is still voluntary under current situation. Thereby, different parties arranged multiple tests; and employees are requested to join their communities’ test-campaigns, too. This causes low efficiency and makes the tracking or verification of individuals having participated in the tests very difficult in general.     

Challenges faced by Individual foreign expats

● We expect a coherent, consistent, and user-friendly e-system and improving data-sharing.

The current COVID-19 prevention and control measures rely on mobile platforms like WeChat/Alipay and other e-channels, which cause problems for foreign passport and Green card holders, such as: 

Case 2.  Acceptance of foreign names and passports for registration on public APPs
Residents have to submit relevant proofs through a dedicated e-platform in order to correct a falsely created “yellow” Jiangsu health code to “green” status. However, the system is not accepting or recognizing foreign name and passport numbers, which makes it very hard for foreign employees of our member companies to participate in the system correction. Complicated Workarounds are the consequence. The respective foreign national carries the related burdens, e.g. extended quarantine time due to delayed correction.

Case 3.  Health code option for children of foreign nationals
Children with foreign nationality are lacking options to apply for (Jiangsu) health codes, because the function to add family members only recognizes Chinese IDs.

Case 4. Link between different APPs enabled for foreign nationals
Different systems require different spelling or order of foreign names, with or without dot or comma, so that a link between different applications for nucleic acid testing, vaccination and (Jiangsu) health code might simply not work for some foreign nationals.

Above examples are only some cases, in which the EUCCC Nanjing Chapter is supporting their member companies or their employees in maneuvering through the challenges amid the current epidemic prevention and crisis control management in Nanjing. Our Nanjing office team is dedicated to continuously advocating your interest in this regard. 

Should you have any other example to share or should you require any specific assistance, please do not hesitate to contact the EUCCC Nanjing Chapter Team at any time. Our team colleagues are highly committed to assisting our members and the European community to overcome the challenges that we all are currently facing in the greater Nanjing area. 

Wishing you all the best and good health,

Andreas Risch

Chairman of European Chamber Nanjing Chapter