Videos show how infants separated from their parents in Shanghai were left crying and unattended in an overcrowded quarantine center amid the city's COVID-19 surge

• Videos are circulating of what appears to be an overcrowded children's quarantine ward in Shanghai.
• The videos on Weibo, the country's Twitter-like platform, showed screaming toddlers left unattended.

Videos and images circulating over the Chinese social media site Weibo appear to show screaming toddlers being left unattended and babies being isolated under cramped conditions in what looks to be a COVID-19 isolation facility.

In one video compilation, toddlers and babies alike were seen unattended in a facility. Several babies were placed in the same cot, next to another cot with what appeared to be three toddlers — one of whom was crying loudly.

At press time, the original post appeared to have been taken down, but re-posts of the same video and images were available on Weibo and Twitter.

The videos on Weibo were initially labeled as having been taken at a COVID-19 isolation facility in the Jinshan district of Shanghai but it was later revealed that they were taken in a ward at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center.

In a statement to The New York Times, the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center did not deny that children were being separated from their Covid-infected parents and confirmed that the videos and images were real.

In a separate statement published by Chinese state-linked media outlet Xinhua, the center confirmed that the images and video taken were of its facility. However, the center claimed that the video did not show the children in quarantine and that the footage was of an "internal reshuffle of the children's ward."

"Recently, because of an increase in the number of cases of children contracting COVID-19, and to improve the living conditions of our hospital, we have been adjusting the pediatric facility and the emergency department. There was also a need for an internal adjustment because the number of children getting COVID-19 is still going up," read the statement shared by Xinhua.

However, parents that The Times spoke to said that their children have been separated from them and were sent alone to facilities.

Shanghai native Lucy Zhu, 39, told The Times she had been separated from her two-year-old daughter after testing positive for COVID-19 at the Shanghai Tongren hospital. She said her child was later transferred to an overcrowded facility in Jinshan and was now living under "totally inhumane" conditions.

Another Chinese mother named Esther Zhao told Reuters that her toddler had been sent to the Jinshan facility and that she had not received any photos of her daughter since she last saw her on March 26.

"There have been no photos at all... I'm so anxious, I have no idea what situation my daughter is in," said Zhao, per the outlet.

Chinese health officials on Sunday reported 438 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Shanghai, along with 7,788 asymptomatic infections. Half of Shanghai's population of 26 million people remains under a strict lockdown as the city struggles to keep the spread of COVID-19 under control.