onsdag 6. april 2022

Shanghai Adjusts COVID-19 Policy Separating Children and Parents

Shanghai is allowing healthy family members of children infected with the coronavirus to stay together at the city’s centralized quarantine locations, relaxing a policy that previously separated minors from their families, local media reported Tuesday.

The policy has been implemented at a “shelter hospital” — or fangcang — in the city’s Pudong New Area that can house nearly 15,000 patients with mild or no symptoms, according to the media report, citing people in charge of the hospital. The hospital had admitted its first group of 89 children along with at least one family member by Tuesday morning. The leniency in the city government’s policy came after days of unease by anxious parents scrambling to get information about their children in centralized quarantine centers. Some of the separated children even included infants.

“The policy has come as a big relief to me,” a Shanghai mother surnamed Fang, with children aged 2 and 8, told Sixth Tone.