‘Totally inhumane’: Child separations feed anger in a locked-down Shanghai

ASIA PACIFIC

‘Totally inhumane’: Child separations feed anger in a locked-down Shanghai

A child's hands are seen on a barrier at an area under lockdown in Shanghai last month. The fury and concern of parents over what might become of their children if they fall sick is the latest in a series of crises faced by Shanghai officials, who are in the middle of a staggered lockdown to facilitate mass testing in the city. | REUTERS

By Paul Mozur and John Liu
The New York Times

Apr 3, 2022

Photos and video that showed young children isolated from their families and crying at a Shanghai hospital led to an outburst of anger online Saturday as China’s largest city struggled to contain an outbreak of the highly contagious omicron version of the coronavirus.

In the images, a series of hospital cribs, each holding 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 showed several of the children crying.

The images and video could not be independently verified, but in a statement, the health center said they were real and did not deny that parents with COVID-19 were being separated from their children.