Photos and videos showing young children isolated from their families and crying in a Shanghai hospital sparked an online rage on Saturday as China’s largest city struggled to contain an outbreak of the highly contagious Omicron virus. version of the coronavirus.
In the footage, a series of hospital cribs, each carrying several young children, appeared to be parked in the hallway of the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center in the city’s Jinshan district. A video shows how several children cry.
The images and video could not be independently verified, but in a statement, the health center said they were genuine and did not deny that parents with Covid were being separated from their children.
Parents’ anger and concern over what might become of their children if they become ill is the latest in a series of crises facing Shanghai officials, who are in the midst of a staggered lockdown to facilitate mass testing in the city. Things have not gone smoothly. Lockdowns have varied by neighborhood, panic buying has cleared supermarket shelves and people with life-threatening conditions have placed calls for help online when they couldn’t get to the hospital.
The whole process has also been opaque. Residents complain that they have had few warnings about neighborhood lockdowns, which have been extended repeatedly in some districts. Domestic news reports about an outbreak at an elderly care center disappeared from the internet on Saturday.
In Shanghai, anyone who tests positive for the coronavirus, whether symptoms are severe or not, must be isolated in a hospital or designated facility. The practice worries parents, who fear their children will be separated from them if forced to isolate.
A woman who said her 2-year-old daughter was locked up at the Jinshan clinical center called the situation “totally inhumane” in a telephone interview. The woman, Lucy Zhu, a 39-year-old mother and born in Shanghai, visited Shanghai Tongren Hospital with her daughter after feeling unwell last week. Shortly after she tested positive for the coronavirus and began her isolation in hospital, she was separated from her daughter.
On Tuesday, her daughter was transferred to the center in Jinshan, and Ms. Zhu was told she could not accompany her. From then until Saturday morning, she had been unable to make direct contact with her daughter. Although officials said her daughter was fine, they offered her no evidence.
“The doctor sent me a video at noon today,” Ms. Zhu said on Saturday. “There was only one nurse in the whole room, but I saw about 10 minors.”
In a statement, the health center said the children were being moved to a new expanded children’s center and that the center was not an isolation center for children, as claimed online.
Ms. Zhu said the statement does not address the main issue. “Is the crux of whether it is an isolation facility for children?” she asked angrily. “Could they treat kids like this if it wasn’t an isolation point for kids? What’s the point of clarifying the rumor in this way?”
When Irene Yang saw toddlers being separated from their parents on Chinese social media, she took matters into her own hands and called the center on Friday. During the conversation, which she recorded and later posted on Weibo, Ms. Yang, a 28-year-old mother, nearly burst into tears, fearing that the same situation could happen to her as the coronavirus continues to plague Shanghai.
A woman who answered Ms. Yang’s call told her there could be a “delay” in transferring children before parents could see them.
With a 3-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter at home, Ms. Yang said she couldn’t “be sure and let them go to one place alone, be it for medical treatment or isolation, no matter what the situation is.”
“It is fine for us if we can be with our children, even if they are infected, but you cannot take the children away alone. This is all inappropriate and unreasonable whether they are 10 years, 5 years or 3 years or 1 year old. Why else do we have legal guardians?’
A woman who answered the phone at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center on Saturday declined to comment further.
An article in the state-run China Philanthropist described a child being separated from her mother and father after being sent to separate isolation hospitals. The article quoted the girl’s mother expressing concern about her daughter after failing to receive photos of her or other communications from doctors. The government-affiliated Shanghai Women’s Federation said on Saturday it was investigating the situation.
Zeng Qun, deputy director of the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau, acknowledged at a news conference on Saturday that infected adults may need to be separated from their children. He described the problem as “heartbreaking” and as something that “needs to be solved properly.”
With designated child welfare workers at the municipal and neighborhood levels already in place, Mr Zeng said that in situations like these, they “need to react quickly and take the physical and mental safety of the children as the first principle, and provide emergency and emergency services quickly.”
