Shanghai Announces ‘Exceptions’ to Family Separation Coronavirus Policy After Global Embarrassment

Shanghai’s government announced on Wednesday limited “exceptions” to a policy separating children from their parents during Chinese coronavirus quarantines mandated by the state.

“Guardians of children with special needs who are infected with Covid-19 [Chinese coronavirus] can apply to escort them,” Reuters paraphrased Shanghai health official Wu Qianyu as saying on April 6.

Wu revealed the new policy adjustment at a regular press conference on Wednesday after a reporter asked her about Shanghai’s controversial quarantine rules, which include strict separations of children from their parents.

Parents who choose to accompany special needs children into quarantine “must sign a letter stating that they are aware of the risks and will be required to comply with protection measures such [as] masks and not sharing household items with the children,” the Shanghai health official noted on April 6.

Wu on April 4 had defended the Shanghai municipal health commission’s policy of forcibly separating babies and children from their parents in the name of quarantine enforcement.

“If the child is younger than seven years old, those children will receive treatment in a public health centre,” she told reporters at a press briefing on Monday, as quoted by Agence France-Presse (AFP).

“For older children or teenagers … we are mainly isolating them in centralised (quarantine) places,” Wu said.

Shanghai’s current Chinese coronavirus quarantine strategy forces anyone who tests positive for the virus to be isolated from non-infected people, even if the positive cases are asymptomatic or display only mild symptoms of the disease. The harsh delineation applies to “children who test positive but whose family members do not,” AFP observed on Monday.

The news agency reported on April 4 that Chinese citizens had openly denounced Shanghai’s child separations across Chinese social media platforms, such as the Twitter-like Weibo microblog, in recent days.

“Parents need to meet ‘conditions’ to accompany their children? That’s absurd … it should be their most basic right,” one anonymous Chinese netizen allegedly wrote on Weibo.

“Unverified videos of babies and young children in state-run wards have been widely shared,” AFP further revealed on April 4, referring to makeshift quarantine hospitals for Chinese coronavirus patients in Shanghai.

Shanghai’s child separation controversy this week has merely added to the city’s growing woes. The metropolis of nearly 26 million inhabitants has been locked down to various degrees since March 28 as municipal health officials attempt to contain Shanghai’s latest epidemic of the Chinese coronavirus. Shanghai first launched anti-epidemiological measures on March 11 when the city’s government shut down all schools to curb a then-fresh outbreak of the Chinese coronavirus. The city, which is China’s most densely populated, has failed to avoid surging cases of the disease in the month since then despite its desperate lockdown and quarantine measures.

“In a major test of China’s zero-tolerance strategy to eliminate the novel coronavirus, the government widened the lockdown to eastern parts of the city and extended until further notice restrictions in western districts, which had been due to expire on Tuesday [April 5],” Reuters reported of Shanghai’s newly expanded lockdown.