Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Shanghai alters covid family policies
Move comes after days of parents with positive tests being unable to see kids
Shanghai officials have responded to days of public outcry about a policy of separating children who test positive for the coronavirus from their parents, clarifying that parents who also test positive will be allowed to stay with their children.
But they said they would continue to separate children from parents who were not infected, citing national virus control guidelines.
The announcement, at a news conference on Monday, followed days of online fury and accusations that officials’ response to the virus was worse than the virus itself.
Shanghai is battling its worst outbreak since the pandemic began, having logged more than 70,000 cases since the omicron variant began tearing through the city last month.
As officials raced to contain the virus, photos and video began circulating over the weekend of young children crying at a Shanghai hospital.
Some photos showed multiple children sharing a crib in what appeared to be a hallway of the hospital. Even parents who also tested positive reported being unable to see their hospitalized children.
The hospital, the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center, later issued a statement confirming that the photos were real, though it disputed that they showed an infant isolation facility.
On Monday, city officials more directly addressed “the issue everyone is paying attention to, of parental accompaniment.”
“We have clarified that if parents have also tested positive, they can stay in the same place as their child to accompany and take care of them, and receive observation and treatment together,” said Wu Qianyu, a Shanghai health official.
Those families will be sent to centralized isolation facilities, she added.
On Tuesday, a state media outlet published photos of a makeshift hospital set up in the Shanghai New International Expo Center, with one ward specifically dedicated to treating children and their family members who had tested positive.
Still, officials did not relent on the practice of separating children from uninfected parents.
Wu told reporters that national treatment guidelines mandate that infected patients be separated from those not infected.
As a result, children under 7 whose parents did “not meet accompaniment requirements” would be treated at public health centers, she said. Older children would be sent to centralized isolation facilities.
On the social media platform Weibo, many users were not pleased.
Under the hashtag “Shanghai health commission replies to how infected children be treated,” which was viewed more than 80 million times, commenters urged policymakers to be more compassionate and noted that medical staff members were not necessarily trained as caretakers.