TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Chinese netizens have expressed outrage on Weibo after posts emerged on the social media platform showing babies in Shanghai separated from their parents while undergoing COVID-19 isolation.
The first images and video footage of the quarantine site appeared on Friday (April 1) and soon went viral. By the following afternoon, one related hashtag had garnered over 180 million views, according to What’sonWeibo report.
Videos showing babies crying uncontrollably were particularly upsetting to netizens. Many criticized the understaffed facility, citing an unverified report that the quarantine site had only 10 nurses to look after 200 babies.
Some of the infants were reported to be less than two months old.
The Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center released a statement on Saturday (April 2) that acknowledged the footage was from a pediatric hospital in Shanghai’s Jinshan District. However, authorities denied there was a so-called “baby quarantine site” and instead said the staff were in the process of “adjusting and improving” conditions on-site.
Yet a Reuters report released the same day confirmed what netizens had suspected — that Jinshan District does have a quarantine zone especially for COVID-positive children. It also reported that parents, regardless of their infection status, were not allowed to accompany their children inside the area.
“Even in concentration camps, the kids and parents stay together,” wrote one netizen about the images. “These kids are getting lifelong trauma, and so are their parents,” wrote another.
“If the child is positive (for COVID-19), and the parents are also positive, why can’t they all quarantine together?” asked one influencer with millions of followers. Other netizens called the infant isolation sites “insane” and “inhuman.”
Prolonged separation of very young infants from their parents can result in abnormal brain development, according to researchers at the University of Michigan.
