The footage shows five people dressed in white, hazmat suits and face masks appearing to try and shove a person into a van.
The person can be heard yelling as they struggle against the group before eventually being forced into the vehicle.
The video claims to show police forcing a person off the street into a van. The person can be heard yelling as they struggle to get them in the vehicle. Photo / Twitter
The video has been viewed more than a million times, with social media users horrified by the footage.
"A public health crisis is evolving into an humanitarian crisis," one person said.
"After being stuffed in a van with possibly contaminated people, he's sure to have it now," another said.
One person wrote: "Looks like scenes from a horror movie."
China's police have recently been called out by the country's top court for a too-harsh crackdown on online rumours about the virus outbreak.
A man in a dark uniform was filmed overseeing the incident. Photo / Twitter
The coronavirus has been likened to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which China experienced an outbreak of in 2002 and 2003.
The spread of this new infection has now surpassed the global reach of the SARS outbreak.
Authorities suspect the disease originated in a seafood market that sold live animals in the central city of Wuhan, and told the World Health Organisation about the new virus on the last day of 2019.
A day later, eight people were detained by police after claiming online that Wuhan was in the grip of a fresh SARS outbreak.
The group were punished for "publishing or forwarding false information on the internet without verification", a police statement at the time said.
But the country's Supreme Court lashed out last week at the police over the incident, with judge Tang Xinghua saying while the information might not have been accurate, the people involved did not deserve to be punished.
"If the public had believed these 'rumours' at the time, and carried out measures like wearing masks, strictly disinfecting and avoiding wildlife markets … it might have been a good thing," he said.
Tang said the indiscriminate crackdown on online rumours could have "become negative textbook material for weakening public trust in the government" or a "vicious event" eroding support for the Communist party.
China has instituted the largest quarantine in human history, locking down more than 50 million people in the centre of the country.
Those who have recently been to Wuhan are being tracked, monitored, turned away from hotels and placed into isolation at their homes and in makeshift quarantine facilities.
Residents from Hubei province also receive daily phone calls and can be made to have their temperature checked up to three times a day.
During the past decade, the Chinese government crafted a rigorous system of social control, which it calls "stability maintenance."
Through both high and low tech methods that range from face-scanning cameras to neighbourhood informants and household registration, Beijing keeps track of its 1.4 billion citizens, managing them via community-level officials.
Since the virus outbreak millions of local officials have been mobilised to monitor, screen and warn – and restrict, to varying degrees – in a governance approach that Beijing calls "blanket-style tracking."
"We must effectively manage people from Wuhan according to the principles of 'tracking people, registering them, community management, inspecting them at their door, mass transfers, treat abnormalities,"' Li Bin, deputy director of the Chinese National Health Commission, said at a news conference.
