Young Boy Infected With COVID-19 Is Separated From His Parents During Quarantine

China’s stringent zero-COVID-19 policy serves as a stark reminder of the country’s extreme levels of proactiveness as far as tackling the pandemic is concerned.

In a heart-wrenching incident, a 4-year-old boy who was tested positive for COVID Delta variant was made to enter a CT scan room all by himself, and is likely to go to quarantine alone, CNN reported. The incident was captured by Zhu Xiaqing, a nurse who worked at a quarantine hospital in the city of Putian, which is currently being pegged as the epicenter of China's latest Delta variant outbreak.

The daunting footage of the child, entirely covered in a white hazmat suit and backpacking down a hospital’s corridors, piqued the anxiety levels of millions of users who viewed it on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform that’s similar to Twitter, as it went viral this week.

The country’s extreme intolerance toward contagion has helped combat multiple resurgences of the deadly coronavirus. Some of China’s infamous COVID elimination policies include placing entire neighborhoods under lockdown, group testing of residents in a span of few days, and rapidly isolating infected individuals and their close ones in designated facilities, the outlet reported.

The target group comprises schoolchildren, who were reportedly the first batch of carriers of the variant as 57 cases out of a total of 129 are under the age of 12, according to Yahoo! News.

During a recent interview with a media outlet, Xiaqing recounted how she couldn’t contain her tears after sighting upon an ambulance filled with young students arriving all dressed up in hazmat suits. She averred how the ambulance had arrived late as one of the children was crying for over two hours until she was wheeled into the ambulance. Xiaqing added how some of the children were so young that they had to be carried by the doctors in order to be placed for CT scans.

The policy applies to kindergarten kids as well, who are forced into hospital isolation upon exhibiting the mildest of symptoms. Xiaqing cited how it was indeed a heart-breaking to see young kids gripped by the fear of uncertainly, as they were coaxed into ambulances before being quarantined without their family’s will.