While the Chinese New Year is typically a time for family, a pair of parents have been accused of ditching their two children at the Nanjing airport after one of them showed signs of being sick in a story that seems too cruel to be true.

According to a fellow passenger who posted about the incident on Weibo, the parents started raising hell when they were not allowed on a flight to the Hunan capital of Changsha early on Thursday morning because their young son was running a fever.

With the deadly Wuhan virus spreading across the country, Chinese airports have stepped up screenings and are not allowing those with high temperatures to board flights to hopefully prevent the situation from getting even worse.

That explanation was evidently not good enough for mom and dad, however, as they clashed with airport staff, resulting in the flight being delayed and the gate changing twice.

In the end, the situation was resolved in a rather unexpected way, with the parents getting on the plane by themselves, leaving behind their two children at the airport. According to the Weibo user, it fell upon ground crew to take care of the kids.

The passenger’s post has gone viral on Weibo with nearly 300,000 reactions and more than 11,000 comments from netizens who have been rendered stunned and appalled by the story. Thus far, there have been no updates on the matter from any local news outlet so it’s not clear how the kids are faring if they really were left by their parents.