Three days later, Zhao begged the health authorities not to separate them after she and the little girl tested positive for COVID-19, saying that her daughter was too young to be taken to a quarantine center for children. Doctors then threatened Zhao that her daughter would stay in the hospital while sending her to the center if she refused to transport the girl to the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center in the Jinshan area of the city. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Since then she has had only one brief message that her daughter was well, which was sent through a group conversation with doctors, despite repeated calls for information from Zhao and her husband, who is in a separate quarantine area after also testing positive. “No photos have been taken at all … I’m so anxious, I have no idea how my daughter is doing,” she said in tears on Saturday, still stuck in the hospital she went to last week. “The doctor said that the rules of Shanghai are that children should be sent to designated places, adults to quarantine centers and you are not allowed to accompany children.” Zhao panics even more as images of crying children in a Shanghai health facility went viral in China. The anonymous poster stated that these were children who had tested positive for COVID and had been separated from their parents at the Jinshan Center. Photos and videos posted on China’s Weibo and Douyin social networking platforms showed babies crying while held three in a crib. In one video, a moaning toddler crawls out of a room with four child-sized beds pressed against the wall. While some adults appear in the videos, they are more than the number of children. Reuters could not immediately verify the images, but a source familiar with the premises confirmed that they were taken at the Jinshan facility. The Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center said, however, that the photos and videos circulating on the Internet were not a “ginseng baby quarantine facility” but were scenes taken as the hospital moved its pediatric ward to another building to deal with a increasing number of COVID cases. pediatric patients. This was done to “improve the hospital environment,” she said on her official WeChat account on Saturday. “Pediatric patients admitted to our hospital … have guaranteed medical care and their daily needs are met,” he said. “Currently, we have organized more pediatric health centers to customize pediatric wards, optimize the management process, improve ward management, enhance communication with children’s parents, and do a better job.” The Shanghai government quoted Reuters as saying in a statement that the hospital had refused to comment further. A Shanghai health official said last week that hospitals treating COVID-19-positive children were communicating online with their parents, according to the government’s official WeChat account. As Shanghai, China’s most populous city and major economic hub, battles the biggest COVID-19 pandemic, stories like Zhao and videos of divorced children anger residents and raise questions about the cost of a “dynamic cleanup” policy. Beijing to combat the spread of the disease. POSTED DELETE By Saturday, the original post had been deleted from Weibo, but thousands of people continued to comment and repost the images. “This is horrible,” said one. “How could the government come up with such a plan?” Said another. In some cases, children up to 3 months old are separated from breastfeeding mothers, according to reports in a WeChat quarantine hospital team shared with Reuters. In a room described in a post, there are eight children without an adult. In another case, more than 20 children from a Shanghai kindergarten aged 5 to 6 were sent to a quarantine center without their parents, a source familiar with the situation said. Authorities have locked up 26 million people in a two-stage process that began on Monday since the last Shanghai outbreak began about a month ago. While the number of cases in Shanghai is small by international standards, the Chinese authorities have vowed to adhere to the “dynamic clearing” in order to control, detect and quarantine all positive cases. The US, French and Italian foreign consulates have warned their citizens in Shanghai that family separations could occur as Chinese authorities enforced restrictions on COVID-19, according to Reuters reports. Shanghai on Saturday reported 6,051 locally transmitted asymptomatic cases of COVID-19 and 260 symptomatic cases as of April 1, compared with 4,144 asymptomatic cases and 358 symptomatic cases the previous day. Mainland China reported 2,129 new cases, up from 1,827. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Report by Brenda Goh and Engen Tham, Additional references by Winni Zhou; Edited by: Christian Schmollinger and William Mallard Our role models: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
