Esther Zhao thought she was doing the right thing when she brought her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to a Shanghai hospital with a fever on Saturday last week.
Three days later, Zhao was begging health authorities not to separate them after she and the little girl tested positive for COVID-19, saying her daughter was too young to be taken away to a quarantine center for children.
Doctors then allegedly threatened Zhao that her daughter would be left at the hospital, while she was sent to the center, if she did not agree to transfer the girl to the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center in the city’s Jinshan District.
Since then she has had only one brief message that her daughter was fine, sent through a group chat with doctors, despite repeated pleas for information from Zhao and her husband, who is in a separate quarantine site after also testing positive.
“There have been no photos at all ... I’m so anxious, I have no idea what situation my daughter is in,” she said yesterday, while crying.
She was still stuck at the hospital she went to last week.
“The doctor said Shanghai rules is that children must be sent to designated points, adults to quarantine centers and you’re not allowed to accompany the children,” Zhao said.
She is panicking even more after images of crying COVID-19-positive children separated from their parents went viral in China.
The photographs and videos posted on Sina Weibo and Douyin social media platforms showed wailing babies kept three to a cot.
In one video, a groaning toddler crawls out of a room with four child-sized beds pushed to one side of the wall. While a few adults can be seen in the videos, they are outnumbered by the children.
Reuters was not immediately able to verify the images, but a source confirmed they were taken at the Jinshan facility.
The Jinshan center did not answer calls yesterday. The Shanghai government did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
As Shanghai, China’s most populous city and main financial hub, battles its largest ever COVID-19 outbreak, stories like Zhao’s and videos of the separated children are angering residents and raising questions about the costs of Beijing’s “dynamic clearance” policy to fight the spread of the disease.
By yesterday, the original post was deleted from Sina Weibo, but thousands of people continued to comment and repost the images.
“This is horrific,” said one. “How could the government come up with such a plan?” another asked.
In some cases children as young as three months old being separated from their breastfeeding mothers, said posts in a quarantine hospital WeChat group shared with Reuters.
In one room described in a post, there are eight children without an adult.
In another case, more than 20 children from a Shanghai kindergarten aged five to six have been sent to a quarantine center without their parents, a source familiar with the situation said.
Shanghai’s latest outbreak begun about a month ago and authorities have locked down its 26 million people in a two-stage exercise that begun on Monday.
While the number of cases in Shanghai’s are small by global standards, Chinese authorities have vowed to stick with “dynamic clearance,” where they aim to test for, trace and centrally quarantine all positive cases.
Shanghai yesterday reported 6,051 locally transmitted asymptomatic COVID-19 cases and 260 symptomatic cases for April 1, versus 4,144 asymptomatic cases and 358 symptomatic cases the previous day.
China reported a total of 2,129 new COVID-19 cases for April 1, up from 1,827 a day earlier.
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