Ant Financial’s mobile payment brand Alipay plotted an expansion of a feature to monitor users’ health, as part of government efforts to prevent and control epidemics by implementing a unified health code.

Alipay announced on its official WeChat account it was “accelerating the development of a unified national health code” in partnership with the government. The programme will be based on its “experience of implementing” the model in the province of Zhejiang and other areas, with the update due to be available this week.

The system requires users to provide details on their health and travel in the country, after which they receive a coloured QR code displaying their current condition.

A red code requires 14 days of quarantine and the provision of updates on DingTalk, a communication app operated by Ant Financial parent Alibaba. Yellow would yield an instruction to remain indoors for a week, while green means no restrictions.

Residents in Hangzhou, the capital city of Zhejiang province, are already required to monitor their status. By 17 February, more than 7.25 million codes had been issued, 6.7 million of which were green, Caixin Global reported.

Tencent also developed a health tracking platform, Reuters reported, as the government turns to technology companies to help combat the spread of Covid-19 (coronavirus).