Amid the coronavirus crisis, people are taking all kinds of steps to protect themselves from infection, and now China’s largest on-demand services provider is offering users who buy food from its platform a paper shield.

For those worried about inhaling water droplets from colleagues, Meituan Dianping is offering a free “contactless shield”. It launched tests in Beijing and Shanghai this week to provide eight restaurant chains, including Yoshinoya and Yonghe King, with the shields when delivering food to some office buildings and hospitals.

“It was just a creative idea at first ... We saw many positive responses from our users after we tested the programme this week, so we are going to provide the free contactless shields to every Meituan employee as soon as Friday,” said a Meituan spokeswoman.

The shield needs to be folded before use, and can be expanded to provide a 20 inch “independent space” which blocks three sides in front of the user, according to a Meituan statement. The company has applied for two national patents for the “contactless shield” from the State Intellectual Property Administration.

“It can effectively block the possible pollution of droplets when eating in a relatively densely populated area,” according to the statement. “With the help of the shields, commuters who return to work can ‘eat alone’ easily.”

Meituan is also offering free shields to hospital staff in Wuhan, the centre of China’s coronavirus outbreak. It is not the first time the company has introduced a contactless service. In January, Meituan launched “contactless delivery” services that allow people to have their food delivered without having to interact with the courier.

China has one of the biggest on-demand delivery industries in the world but the coronavirus outbreak has cast a shadow over the outlook.

Food delivery apps in China had an estimated 30 million daily active users before the Lunar New Year holiday, but this has dropped by half during the epidemic, according to a report by QuestMobile published last week.

Daily active users on Meituan’s food delivery app dropped from around 10 million before the Lunar New Year public holiday to 5.7 million by the end of January.

Tech giants in the country are ramping up efforts to stop the spread of the deadly coronavirus. China’s largest ride-hailing services provider, Didi Chuxing, launched a nation-wide programme last month to install protective plastic dividers between the driver and passenger seats in cars to prevent droplet transmission of the Covid-19 disease.

 - SCMP