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Shanghai health officials have defended a policy of separating babies and young children from their parents if they test positive for Covid, amid growing frustration at the city’s brutal zero-Covid policies.
Around 25 million people in Shanghai remain locked down as authorities try to snuff out the country’s most severe virus outbreak since the end of the first pandemic wave in early 2020.
Under China’s unbending virus controls, anyone found positive – even if they are asymptomatic or have a mild infection – must be isolated from non-infected people. That includes children who test positive but whose family members do not, health officials confirmed on Monday.
‘If the child is younger than seven years old, those children will receive treatment in a public health center,’ Wu Qianyu, an official from the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission, said Monday. ‘For older children or teenagers… we are mainly isolating them in centralized (quarantine) places.’