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(Adds comment from Shanghai rumour buster WeChat account)
By Brenda Goh and Engen Tham
SHANGHAI, April 2 (Reuters) - Esther Zhao thought she was doing the right thing when she brought her 2-1/2-year-old daughter to a Shanghai hospital with a fever on March 26.
Three days later, Zhao was begging health authorities not to separate them after she and the little girl both tested positive for COVID-19, saying her daughter was too young to be taken away to a quarantine centre for children.
Doctors then threatened Zhao that her daughter would be left at the hospital, while she was sent to the centre, if she did not agree to transfer the girl to the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center in the city's Jinshan district.
Since her daughter was sent to the centre Zhao has had only one brief message that she was fine, sent through a group chat with doctors, despite repeated pleas for information from Zhao and her husband, who is in a separate quarantine site after also testing positive.
"There have been no photos at all... I'm so anxious, I have no idea what situation my daughter is in," she said on Saturday through tears, still stuck at the hospital she went to last week. "The doctor said Shanghai rules is that children must be sent to designated points, adults to quarantine centres and you're not allowed to accompany the children."
Zhao is panicking even more after images of crying children at a Shanghai health facility went viral in China. The anonymous poster said these were children who had tested positive for COVID-19 and been separated from their parents at the Jinshan centre.
The photos and videos posted on China's Weibo and Douyin social media platforms showed wailing babies kept three to a cot. In one video, a groaning toddler crawls out of a room with four child-sized beds pushed against the wall. While a few adults can be seen in the videos, they are outnumbered by the number of children.
Reuters could not immediately verify the images, but a source familiar with the facility confirmed they were taken at the Jinshan facility.
The Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center said, however, that the photos and videos circulating on internet were not of a "Jinshan infant quarantine facility" but were scenes taken when the hospital was moving its paediatric ward to another building to cope with a rising number of COVID paediatric patients.
This was done to "improve the hospital environment", it said on its official WeChat account on Saturday, adding that it had organised for more pediatric workers and would strengthen communication with the children's parents.